VC money is fueling a global boom in worker surveillance tech

I don't necessarily agree with him (there is room for improvement, but we made these regulations due to the bubble in the 90s and 2000s), but he's been very open about this for at least 15 years now.

It's not about making something totally unregulated (in which case there wouldn't be a need for loopholes, as any bad practice would be fine).

More about reducing the more targeted and detailed parts of regulations that prevent loopholes and keeping the "core laws" - that then have gaping holes and blind spots.

> [Updated March 26, 2025]: All entities created in the United States — including those previously known as “domestic reporting companies” — and their beneficial owners are now exempt from the requirement to report beneficial ownership information (BOI) to FinCEN.

It was an anti-money-laundering thing, and money laundering is back in. Once again you can create US companies which are owned blindly by Cayman companies whose beneficial owners are either (a) sanctioned or (b) US nationals who don't want to pay tax.

Source? I thought it’s a best efforts form.

The number of pages in the federal regulations only grows over time (admin to admin). Construction of any kind, including housing, education and childcare come to mind as things you missed.

I.e. - everything that people complain is really expensive.

Most industries in the US are heavy regulated. The ones that are not so heavily regulated - like software, and/or evade a lot of regulation abroad - like many consumer goods from shirts to cars - are the ones not getting more expensive.

This isn't even remotely true. Heavy regulation is actually one of the reasons why it's so hard to do things like build new housing or get high-speed rail, for two popular examples.

Anyone who has worked in regulatory compliance at software or hardware companies will also roll their eyes at the claim that the United States has basically no regulation.

When I was young I worked at a startup where the CEO was out of the office most of the time.

One of my coworkers was irate about how he had to work hard, while the CEO was out there doing who knows what. Being young and impressionable it started to rub me the wrong way, too.

Eventually one of the older guys informed me that the CEO was going out on sales trips to potential customers, meeting with investors, and doing a number of other in-person things that the company needed. That's why he wasn't in the office.

I felt foolish for thinking that his job and my job should look the same and occur in the office.

The disgruntled coworker didn't care, though. He wanted the CEO to be butts-in-seats and staring at a monitor because that's the only type of work he understood. I get the same vibes when people sneer at VCs for stuff like "meeting people all day". That's their job.

VCs’ job is to raise money. Sexy founders and past returns help with that. But the money is essentially booked when an LP signs a commitment.

This describes anyone at the top of their field. A star engineer or academic can spend their time however they please. (And giving them that freedom is generally a profitable bet.)

> By it's very nature it has to be excessive, because the ultra wealthy live a life of excess

It really doesn’t. It just glances with excess. You can pitch your company at Cannes or the Super Bowl without buying tickets to the events.

You vaguely gesture at this being somehow negative. We can strongly dislike something while recognizing the forces behind that something as well. Employee surveillance does not exist in a vacuum, it exists in the same continuum of RTO, of mass layoffs while corporations make record profits, etc and so forth.

You should consider contributing to the discussion instead of making off-topic, passive-aggressive comments policing what people are allowed to like, discussing stereotypes while directly stereotyping OP and this community in general.

Edit0: after reviewing the article, it's very amusing to me that as an employee I had an app for my last desk job that demanded all those except possibly (not certain) for GPS, it might just have identified my location from the wifi connection I was using, as punching would only work on work wifi. And I work in Canada!

I think what everyone is talking about is supremely relevant, because often it starts with some arguably legitimate use case then over time morphs into the thing everyone didn't want.

This tech is basically not allowed or relevant there.

This sticks out in my head as completely divorced from the practical reality of the modern workplace circa the past fifty years. Every single KPI has gone up: productivity, imports, exports, revenues, share price, deliverables, margins, you name it.

The counter-culture cited to justify these sorts of highly invasive spyware deployments is merely the reaction of a workforce to stagnant wages and deteriorating standards of living in the face of an economy that has left them behind, a monied class that loathes their existence, and governments who can’t be bothered to listen to their grievances over the sound of a $25k-per-plate fundraising dinner. Workers aren’t the problem, here, and surveillance does nothing to actually improve things for the majority of society.

To suggest “counter-culture” is the issue is akin to suggesting queer people are responsible for military overspending as opposed to unaccountable defense contractors and PMCs, or that the National Debt is the fault of immigrants as opposed to a government apparatus that fails elementary school maths. There is no “counter-culture” causing a problem in the workplace requiring surveillance, it’s a handful of people at the top of the organization trying to keep as much for themselves as possible demanding said surveillance to protect their own positions and interests - which conveniently happen to be directly opposed to the needs and demands of their workers.

This shift in workforce attitudes is because companies have shifted their view of labor. Labor is now fungible, and labor is not an investment, it's a necessary evil.

In order to have self-motivated employees you need to reward loyalty and build incentives where employees do their best because that ends up being what's best for them. Companies, pretty much all of them, decided this was both too much work and too expensive. So they gave up.

The reality is that workers don't give a flying fuck because not caring is the best way to progress your career. Job hopping, resume building, lying - these strategies work. Being a leader, shaking things up, even being honest - these backfire.

Companies don't want good workers. They want yes men, warm bodies, people who don't think too much. And they got that. So, everyone should be happy.

> disconnected from traditional concepts of professional duty and self-accountability

I wonder what world you think used to exist.

"I don't want to X, but this time it's different and my hand is forced." That's a millenniums-old cope for doing shit you always wanted to do, but needed a way to not feel bad about.

In the early 80s, I remember mass layoffs in the headlines every day. Often older, long term employees, who were more expensive. And company share prices would go up on those announcements.

When I started my professional career in 1986, I was fully aware I was an expendable cog. It didn't make me less professional, but it did make me less loyal. I wasn't planning to work for the same company for 40 years.

Sure enough, 5 years later, the company was acquired and virtually every employee fired. 2000 people. Many of whom had given 20 years to the company.

The acquirer just wanted our customers.

And trade in the derivatives.

The latter half of your statement does reflect a sort of ignorance of reality: when we push for lowered persecution of, say, shoplifting under a given amount or of necessities, it’s because we understand those are often crimes of desperation better solved through social programs, food banks, or job guarantees. I’d love to see cops get off their ass and go after the actual shoplifting gangs and train raiders instead of tasering someone to the ground for stealing a couple bucks of food, but they won’t unless prosecutors are given public mandates of what they should be prioritizing (say, home invasions and vehicle break-ins instead of speeding tickets). Start with the big items and work down, as opposed to the disproven “broken windows” policing style of the NYPD.

With that said, I'm leery of mass surveillance. It might seem egalitarian but there is something to be said for a police officer having the discretion to not enforce a law.

I think I prefer that even if it means some will abuse that power.

... and a probably-equal uptick in people who advocate for extrajudicial murder of people accused of (or just suspected of) property crime (look at the way people on the right talk about homeless folks, immigrants etc). the loudest online are not representative of the majority opinion.

Really? Do you have evidence??

Certain functions like remote employee clock-in with geolocation (literally the first example company in the article) are perfectly reasonable to record the employee's GPS coordinates, in my opinion. If you're clocking in at the job site, having some record that you were actually at the job site isn't an invasion of privacy.

<specific names and dates excluded to protect the guilty>

Irony is that surveillance cuts both ways, and big companies know it. Any data you collect can and will be subpoenaed at some point, and that’ll multiply your damages paid out in the process.