The workplace has become a surveillance state Office buildings have become like web browsers – they're full of tracking technology, a trend documented in a report out this week by Cracked Labs. The study, titled "Tracking Indoor Location, Movement and Desk Occupancy in the Workplace," looks at how motion sensing and wireless network technology in buildings is being used …
“The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.”
“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”
In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.
From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door.
“I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out.
Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”
― Philip K. Dick, Ubik
The companies that do this kind of ... shite ... are thsoe that want to see backs in the office, butts on chairs.
I can read ElReg at work just as well as in the home office. As the BOFH remarked at home there was (in the olden times with a single income family) at least the possibility that those slackers would get trouble from their wife when she finds out they are just slacking off.
On the other hand "thankfully, a snipped of code that redirects users clicking on the 'about us' link to a random porn site looks 'just like the matrix'..." (also BOFH)
We have a few devices that must not be removed from a certain area & Spaces is set to alert if they are.
It is very easy to see the benefits of this but it is just as easy to see the use cases that could be put forwards if management wanted to monitor employees. Yes, spaces will allow me to see what device is connecting to APs in an area, it can also tell me the username. From that I can check email logs, firewalls etc to build up a pretty accurate picture of what someone has been doing.
When I swipe into the building (on the few times I attend the site) my employer knows I am there if they look at the logs, I think that's about the level of surveillance I am comfortable with.
The moment someone says "The logs show that you were inactive for 20 minutes when you were supposed to be working on..." then it is time to leave.
"We have a few devices that must not be removed from a certain area"
ASDA do that with their shopping trolleys. At one supermarket it objects if you park in their overflow car park which is next to their store and deploys a gadget to lock one of the wheels so it can't turn. Undeterred I dragged the trolley, screeching and screaming to my car leaving a long skid mark of shredded plastic on the road and completely knackered the mechanism in doing so. They've obviously not thought this out very well. They've even got a trolley shelter in said car park, so it isn't like they are not expecting this to happen. Idiots.
"When I swipe into the building"
Yup. I have an RFID badge that opens the main gate, and then the employee entrance. Once inside, a different card (next to the reader) is for clocking in and out. I consider these necessary for the security of the site (to stop just anybody getting in) and for tracking when I am there and how long I have worked (particularly if I leave late). Anything more than that and questions would have to be asked.
There are cameras outside, but only outside and it's marked on a big sign and there are cameras. None inside, because there are privacy laws (and it would need the worker's committee to consult with us if that changed). It's a double edged sword though because some bastard nicks smokes from the locker room (I'm okay, I don't smoke) but no cameras because privacy...
To my mind, companies that perform invasive surveillance are demonstrating that they fundamentally don't trust you, time to leave.
Oh, and dumb things like tracking keyboard and mouse activity... they do know that programmers, accountants, even secretaries, do stuff away from the keyboard right? If they wanted somebody to prod the keys for seven hours a day they could hire a monkey, or get an AI to do it. People with brains look stuff up, file stuff, cross-reference (and I mean actual printed materials, not asking StackOverflow). Or maybe just tossing something to the laser printer to save having to fight the awful PDF reader whose implementation of bookmarks was surely created by somebody who have never seen either a bookmark or a book.
And maybe, just maybe, everybody uses the toilet upstairs not to waste time, but because Dave from Finance pisses standing up and half the time he gets it in the bowl...
Was just about to comment on that. I'm a knowledge worker, I'm paid for my insight, knowledge and problem solving. To that end I will regularly move away from the keyboard (WFH or in office) and doodle thoughts on actual paper, occasionally wander off to chat to someone relevant and even sometimes just stare at the wall and think about the issue.
Luckily my employer has not decided to implement these sorts of monitoring techs, we have Teams status colours but that's it.
"The logs show that you were inactive for 20 minutes when you were supposed to be working on..."
The logs are wrong, then. I was working out some details on a pad of paper with a pencil. Sometimes I do that.
Seriously, though, my former company had something called "Hubstaff", which has some quite disturbing Orwellian capabilities for monitoring employees. They never unleashed it on me (apparently it's only used in certain areas on certain workers), but it would not have given a very accurate picture of my productivity, because a good part of what I did was building and testing electronics in the lab. Much of that activity cannot be seen on a computer network. There's also Microsoft and their "productivity metrics" which come almost exclusively from use of their Office apps. I'll not comment on how that might be related to real work, versus trying to make a Microsoft app do what you want it to do.
And the first time I find a presence sensor under my desk (unlikely now that I'm retired), it would have suffered a completely accidental disabling fault.
I'm so glad I had already retired early before covid hit, so I had never used Zoom or similar technology. Meetings were audio only. Never did understand what the value is of seeing a bunch of faces on the screen.
But even then teams were spread around so despite taking my first contract in nearly a decade where I wasn't 100% remote, in the one week a month when I was on site unless there was a critical mass of participants who were local (all us consultants would typically come in the same week) to justify taking a meeting room people were participating at their desks, or in a "quiet room" if they were discussing sensitive stuff like financials.
I have to imagine if companies are making people return to office, but the teams they are working on are geographically dispersed, all they are doing is coming in to work to participate in remote meetings the same way they can at home. Those people are having an understandable backlash to the idea of return to office since they are getting little value out of it - or no value if their direct manager is in a different office.
At one place I worked, I noticed a minor bug in a line of code that someone else had written but because the software had since gone live on their website, I wasn't allowed to fix the bug, which would have taken 5 seconds and with no negative knock on effects elsewhere. However, a meeting was scheduled by my team leader in a conference room upstairs where I made the case for the code change in front of ten other people who all just nodded it through. The looks on their faces were "why am I being bothered with this and how would they know anyway?"
Unless someone is a Fascist with a particular antipathy to Jewish people, they are not a Nazi. Arguably they aren't a Nazi if they are not a member of the NSDAP, an organisation which was disbanded seventy-nine years ago, but that might be a bit picky. In any case, it's very student politicky to call any people you don't like Nazis.
I agree with both of your comments.
Just for those lacking the knowledge:
National Socialism (nazi):
(German: Nationalsozialismus), more commonly known as Nazism, is the ideology & practice associated with the Nazi Party. (Which name they hated, btw.)
Officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterparteior) or NSDAP.
Most definitely, socialist, but seeking the help of a deity, with “Gott Mit Uns” on the belt buckle of each Wehrmacht/ SS trooper.
"Für Ihre Sicherheit"
"For your safety"
To the original, personally, I would label them as socialist, or with socialist tendencies, but using Lenin, Stalin, Marx, etc. as examples. After all, Big Brother was modelled on that sort of behaviour, AFAIK.
As far as fascism is concerned (because that's their next epithet), that's an Italian invention, by Giovanni Gentile, with help from Mussolini.
They're all of a piece, so there's that.
So did the other socialists of the Soviet block, so have other socialists done (Mao, Pol Pot, Che, etc.), so they continue to do, today (Zimbabwe, Venezuela, & more).
It's weird that only the NSDAP receive opprobrium for their actions, & not those others I list.
A friend of mine had to remove a member of his team. I would struggle to call him a Nazi for having done so, but let me explain so you can judge.
Worked an average of 2 hours per day
Took every Wednesday afternoon off without permission
Would drop off client calls or take client calls from his car whilst he was driving his children around during normal working hours
Would extend holidays without explanation, permission or apology
Didn't attend client meetings repeatedly
Persistently late with deliverables without explanation
Oddly he got defensive when this was raised with him several times, suggesting his boss should really be focused on the outcomes he delivered, the output he produced. Sadly there was neither of either, so my friend was drawn to how much time he was spending at his 'desk' to try to understand the delivery gap he was experiencing.
Unfortunately people behaving like this poison the well for others.
"gain insights into how people and things move throughout their physical spaces"
This collects data. There is a gap between data and information which needs to be bridged by analysis. There is a gap between information and insight that needs to be bridged by understanding. Will those bridges be put into use or is it simply more and more unused but potentially dangerous data. As a previous article put it: yellowcake.
This isn't exactly new though.
Back in the last century (well, 1997ish), I went out to lunch with another engineer. He'd come over to apply some updates to a new system and I was there to observe and learn (ironically it was a monitoring system). When we came back from lunch, we went straight back to the machine room where we were carrying out the work.
20 minutes later, I ran up to my desk to grab something. I get called over by my boss. He accuses me of being late back from lunch. Someone had complained I wasn't around! Worse still, in that time he'd gone to a card logging system and got the dates/times my card swiped - and it showed I was late back.
Then I showed him that the time was out on the card logging system, and I had in fact entered the building on time.
At one place I worked, I was developing some new software and was in the habit of working beyond knock off time, this was unpaid overtime on my part, I was just enjoying my work. One evening I worked a couple of hours over but the following morning I got held up in traffic and arrived ten minutes late for work. My boss told me off for my late arrival. When I pointed out that I'd stayed an extra couple of hours the previous evening his reply was "Nobody asked you to." So that was that. I never stayed over again. 5pm and I was under starters orders. Eventually I left for another company.
I started a new job, for which I had made it clear at interview that flexible working hours were important to me, only to find on the first day that the flexible working that I was promised didn't exist. Plus there was (completely voluntarily, of course) 15 minutes of unpaid overtime for everyone at the end of the day.
On the second day I got up to leave on time, and was stared at by everyone as I think they were expecting lightning bolts to come flashing out of the manglers orifice to strike me down. Little did they know that the mangler had arrived 15 minutes early at the start of the day, to find me already at my desk working away. The following day he arrived 20 minutes early ...... to find me already there. This continued with the mangler arriving 5 minutes earlier each day, until he gave up after arriving 40 minutes before the official start of the day to find me already there.
The thing was that SHMBO started two hours before me, and when she woke up I also woke up. So I would get up, lounge around for an hour, and still get into work and at my desk an hour early. But being there an hour early I was not gonna put up with some BS about doing an extra 15 minutes at the end of the day.
Anyway, by the third day I already had feelers out for something else. And the biggest delay was negotiating my new contract, so it was actually 5 weeks before I handed my notice in (telling HR about being lied to in my interview) and left for patures better paid and less lied to.
> Plus there was (completely voluntarily, of course) 15 minutes of unpaid overtime for everyone at the end of the day
It was sort of like that at my first job after school having completed my apprenticeship - it was sort of an unwritten rule that you were expected to take work home with you (this was in an office) as there was never enough time or people to do the workload.
Worst set of managers (bar 1) I ever experienced, found a better higher paid job that also launched my career ever upwards and got out of there
A guy I knew had that. Complex machine, needed starting up in a specific way or it would sulk massively. He would come in early to get it all running before the production workers arrived at eight. He did this because he liked to work on the machine in peace and he took pride in his work.
One day he needed to leave a quarter hour early for an appointment (doctor, dentist, something like that). His manager said okay, but didn't bother to do the paperwork because he knew the bloke comes in early and in the long run fifteen minutes is neither here nor there.
Next day, somebody else drags him before HR, screams about all sorts of things, reminds him that he must exactly work his contacted hours, no exceptions.
Next day, he starts at eight on the dot, as per contract. Other guy is fuming. The machine isn't ready. Even worse, it probably won't be ready for an hour or so. But, hey, 8am are the contracted hours.
At this point I'm wondering if "other guy" will try to amend the contract. Nope, it's written in the contract that changes must be agreed in writing by both parties.
But no even worse. The following day my friend walked into utter chaos. Seems that other guy decided to get the machine going himself and, well, my friend mentioned heavy machinery and eye watering expense. Which was the point when he decided to embark upon another career, after writing up a report on what had been going on and mailing it to head office.
Turns out "other guy" was the company owner's nephew and he thought he was untouchable. Putting one of the important machines out of operation for the foreseeable future might test that theory.
Knowing the way of the world, they probably laid off a few of the production workers to recoup some money and moved the idiot to some position where he might be able to do less damage...
Years ago the new head of the chemistry department in the Very Famous University where I worked (I was in physics, next door) decided that postgraduate students weren't working hard enough and installed a time clock which he insisted they use. So they did ... clocking in at 9am each day and clocking out at 5pm each day. No research which required any work outside those times, which is "most of it" got done and the work of the department ground to a halt. Two weeks later the time clock was removed, and it was Never Spoken Of Again.
I once had a boss who mentioned something like that to me. I ignored him, as I was a salaried employee and the company had a "flex time" policy (as long as you were around when needed and got your assigned work done, you could come and go as you pleased). Since I was being paid for what I knew, not how many widgets I produced per day, I took advantage of that policy. Said manager didn't last long. If he had, and if his clock watching had become a problem, I would have found another job.
Funny, how in university, one is left to one's own devices as far as getting the work done, and it somehow manages to get done (for those of us who get the diplomas), and yet, once one gets hired as a "professional", out come the watches and schedules.
> one is left to one's own devices as far as getting the work done, and it somehow manages to get done (for those of us who get the diplomas), and yet, once one gets hired as a "professional", out come the watches and schedules.
Management needs to show that they are doing something and are relevant
People: mostly one foot in front of the other foot, through doorways, up and down stairs or levators (lifts) and I understand occasionally out of windows.
Chaps in wheelchairs or other mobility aids pretty much the same except the foot bit and the windows. Bloody hard to hurl an occupied wheelchair through a window, errr... or so I believe.
Things: mostly because a person has carried, wheeled or otherwise conveyed the thing although in these workplaces thrown or a good bit of welly with the bother boots is equally likely.
The ultimate consequence of this nonsense is the complete dehumanization of people into things and the even more unthinkable that follows.
Terry Pratchett has Granny Weatherwax clearly stating "Sin [...] is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is*."
* From an exchange in Carpe Jugulum between Granny and the Omnium Mightily Oats:
“It’s a lot more complicated than that . . .”
“No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
“Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes . . .”
“But they starts with thinking about people as things . . . ”
"People: ... and I understand occasionally out of windows."
See. e.g. the great satirist Dario Fo's play 'Accidental Death of an Anarchist'. Or Prague's habit of defenestrating people (I understand that at least once there was a large, comforting, pile of 'manure' below one window which broke the victims' fall. Others were not so fortunate.)
PS. I think you mean "Omnian". An "omnium" is a bicycle racing event consisting of several races of different distances and types, done over several days in a velodrome https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/omnium .
In the olden days it was relatively easy to tell whether someone had done their work. An unploughed or unharvested field, unwashed clothing, etc. were pretty evident. It is now that we are* 'brain workers' and the results are not physically obvious or countable objects that there is this worry that people are not 'pulling their weight' in the office.
*In my case "was", as I am now retired, just having trouble 'letting go' of office work-life balance issues.
I once worked* in a large open plan office where the lights were controlled by motion sensors in the ceiling. As we got down to thinking, typing at keyboards, drinking coffee, but not actually moving around much the lights would just go out. Cue much leaping up and down, arm waving and a few expletives.
What companies that spy on their staff with minute by minute recording of activities fail to realise is that this indicates their management structure, recruitment and staff performance review processes are complete junk.**
*Yes, actually despite all the issues, I did actually do some work there.
**Ahh, well, I just realised why they do it now. As you were, nothing to see here, nothing at all.
When I'm in the office I have the same issue but the motion sensors are hidden behind pipework and climate control units so actually have a limited field of view. This means often needing to stand up and wave like crazy (not in a calm, Jedi, 'credits will do fine' way, like 'help, someone's drowning over here' kind of way). I'm assuming this is my employer just checking that we're still alive. No need to pay the 'leccy bill if the employees are dead, I suppose.
Yes, once worked for a big 3 letter international that had an online time recording system. It was slower than a wet week. Amazing what a bit of creative coding did for the productivity.
And then some time later I was told that I was still submitting timesheets - 5 months after I left. Ooops.
Good luck with that Trump and Elon the almighty will be gunning for the NLRB, passing laws to neuter the unions and eliminating ALL paid overtime.
The growth industry will be in slave whip makers If you are a blue collar worker in the USA, then watch out. Who knows, they might make it so bad that people will volunteer to be deported.
The USA is doomed.
Especially if you have cellular reception there. Even if you don't you could randomly turn it off for a while here and there during the day, to frustrate the ability of any tracking they are doing to work properly.
Or if you have IBS or something and take bathroom breaks often, you could turn off your phone before you go so the tracking won't flag you as "takes too many bathroom breaks". It isn't like you would be answering your phone while sitting there, or at least I sure hope not.
Yes, never use the wifi they provide for personal devices - MITM tracking.
Switching to Airplane mode is a convenient way to stop the handset transmitting.
Also, avoid using the work device to browse for non-work topics/sites. Once, at a previous employer, I noticed that no-script was trapping a well-known tracking site - the tracker was on the company internal portal, and the token that was used was the user's login id!
Let's say I browsed or even worse, logged into a retail site where I have an account - then, the company I worked for, could, via the reports from the tracking site, connect my work login id to the retail site account and profile me further via that tracking site, which was pretty much used by the majority of major retail sites and others at the time.
Most places don't have a "personal device" and "work device" anymore. If you have a "work device" then it is pointless worrying about being tracked because you are carrying around something you have little control over - and if you carry with you outside the workplace they can track everyone it goes with information from the carrier. And I'm willing to bet that larger companies have contracts with cellular companies that give them access to that data.
So your worries about browsing for personal stuff on a work device or putting it in airplane mode at work are laughable. If you have a "work device" you have no privacy of movement, they own you 24x7 unless you leave it at your desk when you go home.
Setting aside the legality, this is not a functional tool, because it's conditional on the end user (HR?) using it.
This is the same seeming paradoxical fallacy of adding lanes to a highway and expecting traffic to reduce.
More information does not equate better judgement.
A wise manager does not need to monitor employees.
You do not need pervasive monitoring, even setting aside the fact that most managers do not have the skillset to interpret it, to ensure your employees do their best (within healthy limits).
What long term profitable businesses need are wise decisions, not oceans of 'facts'.
But if you need to 'increase' profit or 'reduce' costs in the short term, you do not need new sticks these days.
Terramind is invisible to the user and records the screen as well as all messages and internet . Silent install.
You need an exclusion on your AV.
It records window titles and as when you Google for something the entire search is in the title then we can see what you Google for.
All your base belong to us.
Soo much surveillance and yet the majority of people are doing basically nothing.
Someone showed me a link to indeed.com and their page claims that resumes are only viewed for on average 7 seconds.
Lets pretend that these HR people are looking at applications for half their time. Thats 40 hours * 60 seonds * 7 resumes = 16800 resumes a week. or 600k+ a year.
How can anyone possibly believe that these people are actually doing any work if they look at an application for 7 seconds ?
If they did look for 7 secs, that basically means they have done nothing for 39 hours a week...
I won't be popular for this comment but I think that universal Internet access at each desk has massively lowered productivity over the last 25 years.
Filtered work-related Internet sites & services should be allowed so that work can get done.
If you need more access, then you make a case for it and justify while it is worthwhile.
And allow general Internet access at a public terminal somewhere on the office floor.
Get rid of messaging systems like Slack & Teams, too, for they interrupt workflow and often they are little more than a distraction.
live cheap live free
get pleasure out of the simpler things in life
only way to win the game is not to play the game, or more pragmatically .... dip your toes in the game every now and again as/when required
Bottom line.... if you cant tell your boss to f-off and move on, when they treat you like they think they are better then you.... its time to reassess the choices you made in your life, especially the material ones :)
Riiiight. It's all materialistic. No one has mortgage/rent/utility bills that are never non-zero despite all efforts to minimise. They don't need to buy food or water, pay for transport (be that public or private). They don't need medical care, prescriptions, therapy. Everyone is in a position where they can tell the boss to do one at the slightest provocation.
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