Comment by applfanboysbgon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by applfanboysbgon | Hacker News Reader

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applfanboysbgon

Nope. Nope nope nope NOPE. No part of this is remotely reasonable. Stop normalising mass surveillance. It is not okay. Not even your own employees, to this degree. Employees are humans too (maybe not the ones at Meta, but I'm speaking in general). Just because somebody is receiving a paycheck for something does not make them fair game for anything and everything to be done to them.

> there's a foreman watching the employees output, and the machine operators have their actions logged so that the machines can be automated in the future. Doesn't it sound reasonable? Is this very different at all?

Yes. Every time these analogies to normalise mass surveillance are brought up, they mistake "another human or two can see you doing something in real time" with "a permanent record of every single action you ever take in your entire life, micromanaged down to the millisecond, accessible to many people over a period of years". That is, in fact, very different at all.

Do you believe that police should have their activities monitored at work? How about child care workers? Nuclear power plant operators? Bank tellers?

And if those are ok, what makes them different?

They’re different because of the job they do, who’s doing the monitoring and who has access to the records.

In all the examples you’ve given the monitoring is used to reduce the power imbalance between the public and vested interests with their own agenda.

For example, so the bank teller doesn’t steal from account holders.

For child care workers it’s to protect children in care. If it was used solely to gather information to fire potential whistleblowers people would have a problem with it too.

Considering that, for example, Meta management have a record of encouraging their staff to break copyright laws and lie about it, this surveillance probably isn’t designed to help society as a whole.

But the job that facebook employees might be surveilling people. Shouldn't they be surveilled so that they don't surveil ilegitimately?

that is the most outlandish comparison ive ever seen

I often feel people make hand wavy comparisons as if everything in the world were equal, hoping the other party can’t clearly articulate why they are clearly not equivalent

That’s not what this was about. It was in response to a dramatic hysterical exhortation that we shouldn’t “normalize...surveillance” as though it’s not already normal and well tolerated in our society, particularly in the context of employment.

It’s not, though. Arguing that it is completely normal because a few kinds of jobs may have it is pretty disingenuous. And a lot of jobs on your list don’t actually have the kinds of controls on offer here, so you’re kind of making stuff up here.

What kinds of controls are you referring to?

None of the examples I provided was made up.

Somehow I don’t believe that is true.

Certain activities, for certain highly restricted purposes, yes. Blanket data collection for a purpose unrelated to safeguarding, which can be trivially leaked, as above, no.

It should be an unpleasant necessity, highly regulated. Not just something that you do on a blanket basis because you suffer under the delusion that you might create the next magic robot (I assume the driving force here is that Facebook is very, very behind in LLM-land.)

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