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It's exactly this.

Development of a feature like this surely started during the WFH craze, where managers could no longer casually walk behind people who had to have their monitors facing outwards. A market opened up, and this is not the only tool for this sort of corporate surveillance.

Certain Software Engineers will probably get some time without it by claiming they need Admin rights and that the system messes up their graphics or slows down their system or what have you.

Or you are living in a country where worker rights prevent causeless mass surveillance of employees.

Workplace surveillance of employees became widespread in part because of sexual harassment laws, employers suddenly had to protect themselves from litigation.

See:

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/r/ro...

That doesn't seem plausible given that "scientific management" is quite a bit older and one of its main concepts comes from an experiment in surveillance from 1927.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect

The linked article does not support what you say in any way. If anything, it argues that invasion of privacy can actually be used against somebody by getting things out of context. It is definitely not what the link talks about, spending 1/3 of the text writing about how wrongfully invasion of privacy was used during Clinton's impeachment. Maybe you meant to share something else?

This is a really pernicious lie. If you believe this sort of thing, explain why you think sexual harassment laws are unfair, and why corporations were so trusting of their employees before that.

Hint: They weren’t trusting. Corporate surveillance follows technology. The bosses are obsessed with watching their workers every second. This is nothing new. What’s new is that we now do most of our work on networked computers, cameras are vanishingly cheap, and data storage is abundant.

Why do you think Recall was designed for this? This seems like a far-fetched assumption to make.

I agree. I believe this project was started in totally good faith. I think one of the managers is on HN here?

I actually want this feature. My memory is awful and I am constantly going to Chrome's History function.

This feature isn't bad, I just want it encrypted locally with no telemetry, which sadly I realize most tech companies love spamming their products these days.

In my times at the MS mothership I never met any managers or developers that were malicious or had bad intent. Sometimes they were overly profit-motivated, but the conversations were always "How much can we price this feature at?" not "How can I make a really evil feature that I can sell?"

It's not even only about surveillance. Microsoft also makes Github Copilot. Getting Recall onto developer machines gives them the opportunity to train their AI on how programmers actually program, rather than just using an LLM trained on code.

Eventually we'll have programmers with Recall activated by company policy on their PCs, actively training the AI models that will replace their labor.

That has to be part of the goal here. The full automation of software development. Think about how much money Microsoft would make if they did it, and how much they would save if they implemented it.

We need a new Luddite movement to protect the workers from all of this.

Typing is the least interesting part of programming. And most of the other doing parts have been automated already (compiling, testing, deploying,…) Most of my days are mostly spent reading, thinking, and waiting.

Hear! Hear!

I work in a massive data center. Manned by very few people. I often think about how many homes could be heated or cooled with the power used to prop up the internet.

It feels borderline criminal when there are homeless and hungry all over the world.

You’ve got a point. Presuming you are correct, what do you think happens when the team has been culled?

Union busting & screen tracking already works pretty well as is for the goals you’ve outline.

We usually think about tracking/measurement as Big Brother looking over our shoulder, but all of us are living a day-to-day reality of losing context and having to invest a lot of effort and time to get it back (usually only partially).

> Union busting & screen tracking already works pretty well as is for the goals you’ve outline.

I don't think I understand your point here. It feels as if you're framing this as a binary decision/outcome. Personally I see Relay making such abuse easier. So I don't think the existence of bad acts in any way lessens the potential harm of Relay.

> We usually think about tracking/measurement as Big Brother looking over our shoulder, but all of us are living a day-to-day reality of losing context and having to invest a lot of effort and time to get it back (usually only partially).

I also don't understand this. Do you keep notes? If the problem is quite large for you, I think you should take more notes and likely better notes (a skill in of itself). Yes, this has cost, but so does everything. There is no free lunch. But notes are distilled while technologies like Relay are dragnets. And at the root of your argument is the recognition that information is powerful. So you have to ask what information has power and to who. Because information that may not be useful to you may be useful to others who wish to use power against you. And in those scenarios, I don't know about you, but I'd rather have distilled information, and more specifically be more aware of what information is being stored, than just scoop up everything.

Personally, I just don't think it is very hard to take notes.

> what do you think happens when the team has been culled?

I'm not quite sure what you mean, I see this as a long term trend that doesn't really have an end point.

There are always people that some manager wants to get rid of, for performance or unrelated reasons.

Employers are scared of getting sued for wrongful termination. Often they do it anyway, but then they need to make up a reason. They're decent at it already, but my prediction is that wrongful termination will become far more widespread and harder to detect or fight in court.

It won't stop though.

I agree it's not cynical. But MSFT doesn't give a shit about surveilling employee computers for PIP purposes. Like, really? A 3 trillion dollar company and this is how they're going to add shareholder value?

They need data to feed their LLM / AI models. Period.

I think you underestimate the amount of businesses who would love this for reasons of fear mongering. Yes, they also want it for training their crummy AI models

If that's the case, why don't they sell Teams activity data to companies? I mean, after you're idle for 5 minutes, Teams detects this and changes your status to "idle". Following your reasoning, they should be selling this data already.

You mean Viva Insights? (formerly Workplace Analytics)

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-viva/insights

Does this allow seeing how long an an employee was idle, or just whether they were in meetings?

As of now, Microsoft seems to be boiling the frog slowly by marketing derived analytics. I believe they're less-than-specific on what goes into the mix.

E.g. "Employees that might be suffering burnout and need attention"

Which I can see for both PR optics and product reasons. If they retain the secret sauce and raw data, it makes it more difficult for others to go over-the-top and compete.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-analy...

As far as I can tell, this does not allow the employer to see whether employees were idle or not. It does allow tracking of how much time they spent in meetings and how many chat messages they sent.

Why are you focused on idle time? You don't think a LLM can try to answer other questions?

Do you think Microsoft will prevent their paying customers (the companies) from querying, "What is the strongest legal reason to fire <person> based on the past three years of activity on this computer?"

Their sales team would be absolute fools not to point out how much easier it makes it for a manager to see historically whether someone is performing tasks as they are specified in some formal handbook.

The difference between doing that for reasonable reasons and doing that for post-hoc justification of targeted reprisals is in the mind of the manager and nowhere else. Maybe unspoken, but incredibly obvious.

"Give me the man and I will give you the case against him."