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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

The reasons given are pretty much a nothingburger and standard compliance items you should be doing anyway!

I am trying to figure out what exactly is the problem people have though: you're literally on a company asset, being paid by the company, you've signed copyright away, you're aware their is no expectation of privacy. Use your cell phone or your home computer for home business, work during company hours, doesn't seem like that big of a deal.

=== EDIT: Re: Comments about about webcams, and nowhere in my comments did I say anything about cameras. Read both the article and my comments before attacking straw men.

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Why should employers be allowed to take pictures and videos of me without my permission or knowledge? If I work from home, how much of my home is now the company's business? Should my employer be allowed to see my home office at will? What if my home office is a bedroom and have private things around that I don't want them to see? Or a living room and I have family moving around in the background? Does my employer actually have a right to film my spouse or children?

There are also issues beyond those. What about employers that require you to install software on your person phone so you can access MFA or work email? Some of that software requires you to sign all rights away from your personal phone and there's a risk you may have all your data deleted on your personal phone when you leave the company.

You want to know how the Overton window shifted from workers as humans, to workers as property? Look at laws around the telephone.

If you have a telephone on your desk, it is illegal for your employer to secretly listen into those calls. However, if you send an email, you employer has every right to secretly read them.

The only difference is, emails don’t exist in the 30s, but telephones did.

I always ponder from this perspective as well, think about the strength of laws regarding physical mail as well. Most of those privacy/tampering laws should have been applied to email from the get go.

Objective snapshot-in-time comparisons like this are fantastic. It's all too easy for the novelty of tech churn to serve as justification for the age-old authoritarian desire.

It’s the decline of unions

Because workers arent slaves or robots, and being on the job doesnt make them such. Your mentality is actually staggering to me.

Can you answer this question directly:

What is it that you don't want seen by a company representative, on a company computer, while being paid by the company?

How would you feel about audio recording in break rooms and hallways? How about fart-detectors in the chairs, recording all that to some database?

Same idea, and maybe you wouldn’t mind but surely you can see why many people would.

FWIW enough people do mind that this kind of thing is illegal in some countries.

Ironically, I'm involved with a startup developing fart monitors as we speak. I'm certain it's going to be a huge market. /s

Farts on company time are company property, so they must be recorded for compliance and liability reasons.

Anything in my home, any traffic on my home network, and any sounds in my home that aren’t me directly talking to a coworker about work matters.

Anything, I'm paid as a developer I'm not paid as an actor.

Yesterday I was working and my three year old came running -- directly out of the shower -- into the room to show me her doll's "new hairstyle".

Can you answer this directly: How many people's computers, servers, and backups should video of my child be on?

Please quote the part of my comment above where I said literally anything about a webcam.

> What is it that you don't want seen

"seen"

Him not replying to you is the funniest tacit admission of being wrong I've ever seen, unless he angrily replies to me. It's surreal that people defend being recorded in your own house. This is figuratively 1984, y'know.

My concern is that workers who produce the desired output for their company, ie perform the labor they are paid to perform, will not be able to use excess time to be with their family, take care of chores, rest, or otherwise live life, and will instead need to pretend to be busy as though they’re still in an office under the watchful eye of an overpaid manager. Monitoring should be reserved exclusively for cases where an employee’s output is not measurable in any other way, and should then be kept to a minimum. If we exclude the possibility of webcam or audio monitoring, then my primary concern is that a worker will be made to waste their time satisfying the arbitrary metric by which present-ness on their company computer is measured, and so the thing I am worried about being seen is the absence of activity.

Different person here, but: literally anything. I don't have "anything to hide," but I don't trust the company's judgment (or, more specifically, that of every possible "company representative." It only takes one to make something a federal fucking issue.)

If I do a google search for "cake toppers for lesbian wedding" while my code's compiling, that's morally fine. But if a bored "company representative" decides to take offense to that, now it's a whole goddamn situation that I have to deal with.

Or if I'm on Stack Overflow to copy&paste, and one of the "Hot Network Questions" in the sidebar has an "offensive" phrase in it, is it going to trip their automated flagging criteria?

Going even further: what if it's for your upcoming lesbian wedding, and the company didn't know that? Maybe the CEO hates lesbians and this information somehow trickles up and you get fired later for a "bad culture fit"? Maybe you have a disability, a serious medical condition requiring FMLA leave, or something else.

Maybe you'll sue for it. Maybe all those activity logs become part of the evidence. Maybe there are other people who got fired under similar circumstances, and you form a class action... After all, who can say that the company isn't engaging in illegal discriminatory behavior based on those logs, simply because the logs were conveniently available and detailed?

Lots of big potential problems here for everyone.

I would not accept employment under any terms that allowed my employer to look at me without my knowledge, or snoop around on my computer without my acquiescence.

It's not your computer, it's a company laptop.

Wouldn’t accept that either. I’ll bring my own computer and then we don’t have to worry about your stupid spyware games.

The attitude of some employers is very poor.

Due to security restrictions, any device you bring to work to use for Company purposes is subject to the IT Acceptable Use Policy and you consent to allow Company to take whatever measures it deems necessary to protect its data including, but not limited to, network monitoring and mandatory installation of endpoint security software.

I haven't seen this implemented for developer workstations; generally BYOD is forbidden for computers. I have seen this implemented for cellphones. If you want to use a personal cellphone for work, you have to install their MDM app and the device becomes, in effect, the company's cellphone.

This is not true, fortunately. Perhaps where you work.

How can this be a serious question? Much of my company is in an earlier time zone and I frequently log into meetings and start work while my wife is still ambling about, showering and walking around naked. My naked wife is something I don't want my employer seeing. A house is a shared space. No one in it except me accepted any sort of consent to monitor agreement.

I don't really need my company's IT team looking at the meetings I'm booking with the therapist on my employer-sponsored healthcare plan, for example

The short prayer I say & religious gesture I make before beginning each new task.

From the article: "Abruzzo’s memo cites things like wearable devices for warehouse workers and GPS cameras on truck drivers, but she pays particular attention to computer-based surveillance, calling out “keyloggers and software that takes screenshots, webcam photos, or audio recordings throughout the day.” The memo goes on to mention tools that keep watching when employees are off the clock, such as those that 'track employees’ whereabouts and communications using employer-issued phones or wearable devices, or apps installed on workers’ own devices.' "

So, we according to the article, we are not only talking about screenshots and access to the computer's contents. I will accept a charitable interpretation that you are comfortable with a subset of bossware, but the article was talking about a wider swath.

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