Worker surveillance must comply with credit reporting rules

The US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Thursday published guidance advising businesses that third-party reports about workers must comply with the consent and transparency requirements set forth in the Fair Credit Reporting Act. The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) was enacted in 1970 to ensure the accuracy, fairness, …

[Tron]

Two sides to this coin.

Some of this Orwellian monitoring is paranoia and rampant corporate greed - monetising everything. It sounds excessive but there are some legitimate concerns. Courier companies have been targeted by organised crime, looting packages. Extremists and activists would love to bag jobs at juicy targets. New legal requirements on controlling behaviour in the workplace can prove expensive if you hire someone with a record of sexual harassment. The US military might need to do a bit more background work on their staff to avoid those who are likely to drink drive over or molest the locals when posted abroad. (Okinawans will be nodding if they read this).

It's not just China's social credit system co-opted to the private sector. There are a lot of criminals, weirdos, psychopaths, gun nuts, perverts, and shirkers out there, who can cost you a lot of cash and your reputation. HR can be tough. A short interview is rarely adequate. Companies love the idea of replacing carbon-based lifeforms with AI, in part because the number of reliable, trustworthy, competent, hardworking and honest people out there seems to be declining at a rate of knots. It's not all one way. How easily would you trust a stranger with the future of your business?

[mostly average]

Re: Two sides to this coin.

Ostensibly, that's what probationary periods are for. I am against this type of mass aggregation of personally identifiable information primarily because the companies that do the aggregating have never heard of network security and make a habit of spilling precisely the sort of information required to steal identities. But all that matters is keeping the riffraff out of the company. It's the peasants problem if they lose everything because of a criminally negligent industry.

[An_Old_Dog]

"A Short Interview is Rarely Adequate"

It can be. Go visit Israel, go through their border security's little five-minute interview, and reconsider your opinion on this.

But ... their interviewers are extremely well-trained, and very experienced.

Most businesses don't want to pay the money it would take to hire and keep HR people with that level of experience and those sorts of skills.

[An_Old_Dog]

Re: Two sides to this coin.

In the workplace ...

* Criminals: a simple background check would yield the relevant data. You could look for criminal org/gang tattoos.

* Extremists and activists: I once worked at a place which did (among other things) primate research. Those facilities have been attacked and vandalised several times, but always by external people, never by employees, contractors, or interns. I don't know how the animal research arm vetted their people, but it worked, and was before the era of computer-data-Hoovering/AI-"prediction".

* Sexual harrassers: I think (YMMV depending on location) the law is not penalizing business for having hired a sexual (or other sort) of harrasser, but for failing to have effective procedures for dealing with such a person. One place I worked RATO'd ("Rocket-Assisted Take Off") an intern the same day he harrassed a woman. Another place trebucheted a probational worker who was harrassing members of a minority genetic/linguistic/ cultural group. The government would be looking to see whether such harrassers at higher levels of management got the same treatment, or were instead given a wink and a nudge.

The problems with computerized pattern-matching to determine a human's tendencies are:

* Correlation != causation (a person matching pattern/s of bad characteristic "A" might match due to other reason/s)

* The "data" being considered is stripped of its context, and other relevant factors. As a single male, I spend time in front of a Victoria's Secret store at a local mall. Not because I'm a pervert, or sexual harrasser, but because my feet get tired, there's a nicely padded bench there, the WiFi signal is strong, and there's a wonderful indie coffee shop just thirty feet away. But "AI don't know, don't care."

[katrinab]

Re: Two sides to this coin.

And even if you did shop in there, then there's nothing wrong with that.

[An_Old_Dog]

Re: Two sides to this coin.

@katrinab: That is true, and is key to a related issue: people having adverse decisions made against them on the basis factors they are not allowed to know about, and have no way of challenging if those factors are irrelevant or unfairly discriminatory.

The same problem exists with old-style secret dossiers, but those take time, money, and drudge-work to compile. Computer systems make dossier-creation super-fast, and super-easy, abd super-cheap. They expand the pool of potential victims by orders of magnitude. Computer systems provide a shield of obfuscation to such wrongdoers*, and "AI" systems even more so.

* People who decide, "We (or they themselves) don't like red-haired people, so you'll pay extra for health insurance. Your phone has been spending a lot of time in a part of town where minority X is concentrated, so you must be, or associate too much with, minority X, so no house loan for you. Your phone has been spending a lot of time in the bad part of town, so you must be a criminal, drug pusher, or drug addict. Your face has been seen [via computer facial recognition, accurate or not] entering marijuana dispensaries {which is perfectly-legal if you have reached your majority}, so you must be a pot-head and thus unreliable, so no job for you. Your face was spotted [computer recog, accurate or not] at a protest which turned violent, so you must be an activist and extremist (you were on your way home, and the protest happened at a government building across from a major commuter-rail station), so no security clearance for you." &c.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Two sides to this coin.

"* Sexual harrassers: I think (YMMV depending on location) the law is not penalizing business for having hired a sexual (or other sort) of harrasser,"

This is the sort of thing that Tesla is having a problem with. They don't fling offenders over the wall or bring them in for the Spanish Inquisition (sans comfy pillows) when there is a complaint. There are people that will holler "harassment" for the slightest thing that is not harassment so it's not appropriate to not take complaints at face value, but look into both sides. These days I'd never ask anybody out from work (as a straight guy). Women better start making the move or wind up alone with loads of cats as they get older since it's becoming risky for guys to ask them out. Good thing I'm self-employed and can take myself out for a dinner and drinks without being called up by HR.

[Howard Sway]

this information might be sold by 'consumer reporting agencies' to prospective or current employers

Er, hang on a minute, every employment contract I've signed has had a confidentiality clause, stating that I cannot divulge any confidential information about that employer to a future employer. This is quite reasonable, but I would not then expect an employer to start monitoring me with secret software of questionable accuracy and sell that information to a future employer either. This sounds like a confidentiality for me but not for thee arrangement, and also has serious consent issues, as well as the risk of errors causing catastrophic career damage.

As a developer who uses online reference material a lot, would this then show up as "uses the internet a lot during the work day"? What if I'm often out at client sites? Does that translate to "poor average daily typing rate, must be lazy"?

This idea is both stupid and very morally questionable.

[ecofeco]

this information WILL be sold by 'consumer reporting agencies' to prospective or current employers

Bro, BRO! Do you even metric dashboard?!

/s in case needed.

And it's not "morally questionable". Unless they are going use that info to reward and help people (hint: never going to happen) it's straight up oppression.

[ecofeco]

information WILL be sold by 'consumer reporting agencies' to prospective or current employers

What a world... 3 thumbs up for oppression.

I knew I should have used the icon first. ---------------------->>>

[MachDiamond]

Re: information WILL be sold by 'consumer reporting agencies' to prospective...

Now all you'll need to do is get proof that will hold up in court, pay an attorney and wait a decade for the case to finally close.

[veti]

Re: this information might be sold by 'consumer reporting agencies'

If the employment contract didn't specify that they can't disclose information about you, I'd assume they probably will. After all, the presence of that clause for you shows that they think this is a plausible scenario; and then the absence of the inverse clause shows that they value keeping the option open for themselves.

"Fair" has nothing to do with it. What matters is who signed what.

Sidenote, if a certain Floridan wins the election, expect to see this measure reversed within the next six months.

[MachDiamond]

Re: this information might be sold by 'consumer reporting agencies' to ...

"every employment contract I've signed has had a confidentiality clause, stating that I cannot divulge any confidential information about that employer to a future employer. "

You have to hope they'll confirm your employment and term or your next employer is going to bin your application. In the US, a former employer if often barred from making negative comments, so a very tepid comment can equate to "we'd never hire them back again, ever". The problem is that maybe that manager or HR person doesn't know you and your file is just ho-hum so tepid is about as far as they can go.

Most of the confidential information a past employer will hold are things you'll have to supply to a new employer anyway.

I use the internet a lot these days for reference. I have walls of mostly reference/engineering books, but I can often look things up online faster unless the parts are really old and long out of production and then my library is pure gold. I also prefer to work with pencil and paper a lot and then translate what I have to the computer so I'm not banging away on a computer all day, but still getting work done. This is why using metrics like active computer time, repository submissions and other generic measurements are not good. It takes a proper department manager that can see what's been done, and having done the same sort of work before, can evaluate how much time it takes.

[ecofeco]

Spoiler

They won't comply and don't care if they caught as the onerous slap on the wrist is pain they can live with.

[Wang Cores]

Just fucking ban it

Or we can just dispense with making a private social credit system and possibly keep a sliver of the constitutional values we're supposed to have.

I'm sure several of the Founding Fathers would have floated it for their slaves/servants, but I doubt they would have agreed to put such a system in practice once the monstrous nature of it became obvious.

[mostly average]

Re: Just fucking ban it

I fully agree, but I don't see that ever happening. Government buying information is their favorite work around for that pesky constitution thing. Plus the gubmint always goes with lowest bidder, which means the winning contractor will be cutting corners everywhere, so they'll inevitably leak everyone's PII because the security budget went to paying the starving executives. And it's the peasants' problem when their bank account gets drained as a result of the willful incompetence.

[EricB123]

Other than the terms used, this sounds like a nation the USA abhors for publication of citizen's data.

Reminds me of a childhood saying "it takes one to know one".

[A random security guy]

Background checks are extremely invasive

I never ran background checks on employees or future employees. But I did run checks on questionable people who were pretending to be executives in a company. The amount of material available online for free and much more from paid services is shocking. You can find CC payment issues, traffic violations, who lived with them at the same address, their internet presence, etc. You can track people's car license plates as people drive around and have their data slurped up by cameras everywhere. If you have access to Palantir, you can become even more invasive.

Now imagine my employer having access to that data.