Why not copy from the Chinese and become a micro police state, instead of building better products or anything quaint like that?
Maybe they can jam some AI in it.
Boeing has paused its efforts to install and use employee-monitoring sensors, including at its office in Everett, Washington, after media inquiries followed an employee's leak of the plans. An unnamed Boeing employee at Everett, a key manufacturing site for the aerospace giant's jumbojets, shared an internal PowerPoint …
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The 737 MAX I had the "pleasure" of traveling on with Ryanair last year was bad enough - unlike their standard old school 737s it didn't feel like it was flying through the air so much as on top of it, with lots of jitters and bouncing in a way that really isn't reassuring in an aircraft.
Introducing the Boeing 737-AI. It'll crash just as easily, but you'll get bullshit telling you it isn't.
Its hard to tell between corporate america and cccp.
Btoh love to make gods out of their leaders, with the respective press telling you how wonderful their leader is. Both wave a lot of flags, both have flags everywhere, both love to spy on their workers, both try and stop voters asking for rights at all costs....
At first glance I though this must be about the factory floor - and that doesn't seem like a bad idea, so they can go back and figure out why doors fall out, etc.
Doesn't seem at first glance to be much use in the office - they can already tell how much time is being spend on TheReg pages through keyboard stroke monitoring etc., right?
All I can think of that they could gather would be stuff like how much time an employee spends in the bathroom or break room. To which I say, who cares? I honestly don't get why some people are so upset about this. If I worked for a company and they tracked my movements around their property during the hours in which they were paying me, go for it. Heck, put a little RFID or low power UWB in the employee ID badge that can track as you pass through choke points like doorways and save yourself the cost/trouble of putting up cameras everywhere.
But any attempt to track me outside their property or my working hours and I'd quit immediately.
I will say if they set up a system that allows tracking your movements, then I shouldn't have to do anything to open up the doors to "secure" spaces. They should see me coming and open up automatically. For bonus points, if it detects you being in meeting rooms more than 20 hours a week it puts your manager on a shit list for making you go to too many meetings. Employees would fall all over themselves begging for the system if it did that!
"To which I say, who cares? I honestly don't get why some people are so upset about this."
Until you find yourself in an HR interview with a list of your toiliet breaks, put on your first written and told when and for how long you can piss and that crapping is for home, not company time and in future you'll need to give the compay 24 hours' notice to get the key to the traps.
"blurry photos"
Yeah, right. Under s/w control no doubt since I very much doubt they bought and installed cameras deliberately and manually set to be out of focus. Click a button and they all record in glorious 4k. Or they record and store in 4k but let you see only the blurred image. Again, click a button for the full HD version.
I wonder how much this costs compared to just putting extra badge access doors in the relevant areas so you know who is in which area and when they move to another area? All you really need to know is how many people are in each large, open plan office. You DON'T need to know if someone is sitting in a specific seat. Open plan areas are notably difficult and expensive to micro-climate control be area, what with being open and all :-)
"set to be out of focus. "
Out of focus optics will lose the phase information but your cynical suggestion that their software blurring function is almost certainly invertible is lossless is probably on the money. In this case the recordings contain blurred images but with the right software they can be deblurred during replay. The blighters could also apply some encryption in the blurring algorithm which make the blurring appear random for that extra plausible deniability sauce.
I am surprised that Boeing shareholders haven't sunk the slipper into the board, the C-suite and manglement generally commanding their sorry arses to cease ffaffing their employees about and generally stop this distracting nonsense and concentrate on again manufacturing reliable, economical, efficient aircraft which can manage to take off and land retaining the same number of doors.
I suspect the idea is to be able to do "X% of desks were occupied for Y% of the time" sort of reporting. PIRs will simply tell you that an area of the office had people move through it - it's notable that in our office, some area will go dark in quieter times, but the lights come on when someone goes to get something from the printer.
With the right sort of algoithms, the system could determine how many desks were occupied. A very useful metric for the business would be "on what % of days do we exceed Y% occupancy, what's the number of Z%, etc." If you have an office where you rarely have 50% of the desks in use on any day, then arguably you have too much office space. But if you have >90% regularly, then you might not have enough. This camera system probably tells you that, PIRs can't.
Quote
"I am surprised that Boeing shareholders haven't sunk the slipper into the board, the C-suite and manglement generally commanding their sorry arses to cease ffaffing their employees about and generally stop this distracting nonsense and concentrate on again manufacturing reliable, economical, efficient aircraft which can manage to take off and land retaining the same number of doors."
I doubt very much if the shareholders even care, hell, so long as the share price went up, and the share buyback carries on, the shareholders would'nt care if every boing aircraft exploded in flames, with the employees being ground up and used as a cheap filler for hot dogs.
This is similar to Windows Recall but by room cameras rather than per PC. Cameras are usually banned from office areas where any kind of Intellectual Property is generated (aircraft designs, anyone?) for good reason. Boing have just created an IP theft goldmine that hackers will be all over before you can say “cabin crew seats for landing”. Well done them.
The bullshit alerts are firing today. There is super cheap motion sensors plentifully used already for, I don't know, every automatic door opener ever made. Don't need a zillion cameras and hulking "AI" processors for that!
Decades ago, the place I worked at put up a new building. This building included "occupancy sensors", for "energy efficiency."
I was in a very large bathroom (handicapped-accessible and all that), which had a single toilet, which was facing the door. There were no stalls. I was sitting on that toilet when the lights went out. Being only partway through my business, I was not about to jump up and try to waddle through the dark to the lightswitch I presumed was on the wall next to the door.
Instead, from my sitting position, I yelled and waved my hands back and forth over my head. After a bit, the lights came back on. Looking at the wall near the door, I saw there was no lightswitch. There was a blank panel at the spot a switch should be, but no switch.
I returned to my task of dropping some kids off at the pool. The lights went out. I yelled and waved. After some delay, the lights came back on. I began doing my 'paper work'. Lights off. Yelling and waving. Lights on. More paperwork. Lights off. Rinse-and-repeat. While this was happening, the lights-on period kept decreasing. Eventually, my hands dripping after my having washed them, I went to the WC door, unlocked it, opened it, and propped it open with the waste bin so as to get the light inspill from the hallway when the lights timed-out again. I finally did dry my hands and get out of there.
Whomever developed, or recommended, or appproved, or bought that system deserves a sharp ass-kicking, followed by a dirty swirlie.
(Icon for that WC's occupancy sensor system, and not for the uplevel poster.)
Took me a few seconds to grok "dropping some kids off at the pool" but the "paper work" really wrapped it up for me. ;)
I may lead a sheltered life but that earnt my euphemism of the week award.
I assume the system used a motion sensor but clearly wasn't installed where it could best detect the same at least for those blessed with regularity.
Thermal sensors in the seat of throne should work reliably for any warm blooded human and likewise for urinals for those that use them. A bit of a bugger for the undead and cold blooded aliens but then I imagine they would have little need for the convenience.
We had some of those at work. The proper application of a sharp spring loaded center punch solved the issue. The solution had to be reapplied a couple times until management got the, erm, point and installed an actual switch.
Anon for obv reasons.
Right now we're dealing with toilets that flush every 30 seconds. I've found a plastic cup over the sensor takes care of it enough for my needs. The sensor glass is too thick for the center punch.
Turns out that, in the UK at least, there are two types of emergency lighting. Maintained, powered by the mains and battery and always on and seemingly common in areas with no natural light, and unmaintained, which are normally off, coming on only when the alarms are trigged or the power goes off. Toilets (bathrooms) of 8m^2 are required to have them and mostly have the maintained type so should always be on, even of the sensor activated main lights tome out.
THis sort of office surveillance will do nothing to help restore the trust between management and workers that has been destroyed by the varous CEOs that have been in place since the merger.
Also, when data is collected it can and will be abused.
Wasn't RTO supposed to fix everything? Why aren't managers in the office and why are they paying so little attention to employees and facilities usage that a whole monitoring system needs to be installed? This sounds like a lazy, morale killing, money wasting VP trying to look innovative.
Any organisation that succumbs to the urge to surveil their employees has already failed. 100% stick rather than looking more deeply at "why is our productivity so poor?"
It breaks my heart to see the direction Boeing has gone in ever since their merger. An engineering-led titan collapsing in on itself. The big cheeses seeing problems in the trenches rather than being able to look at themselves as the problem.
Sad.
Like with all technology its not what it does that's as important as what its used for. Some 25 years ago my office had a motion sensing light switch (windows tend to be regarded as an expensive, energy sucking, luxury for the lower orders around here). It was ultrasonic and worked OK apart from you had to be careful if you nodded off after lunch -- your light would go out, a dead giveaway. This is harmless.
Cameras can be used for benign purposes like the ones we now use on traffic signals instead of relatively unreliable in-road sensors. The same cameras can also be used for ANPR to track movement of vehicles and potentially people. As engineers we should be aware of the technology and both its actual use and potential for misuse. Boeing is supposed to be a company full of technologists but thir complaints make them sound more like paranoid fantasists. Sure, the company might be monitoring individual workstations and so employees -- but then, who's doing the monitoring and what are they doing with the information? (....and can the sensors be defeated like our office sensors so we could get a nap without it being obvious to the entire floor? Come on -- we're engineers......)
B management do get it - the one who doesnt get it is YOU.
The joke is that people like management who contribute so little if anything are the ones who are rewarded the most, and management know this, and they are treating everyone like chumps for allowing this circumstances to exist and continue.
Every corporate office I have been in the past couple decades is festering with security cameras everywhere. Heck, a good 20 years ago I found a pinhole camera in the ceiling tile next to my cube (it covered an emergency exit which also picked up my cubicle). Workplace surveillance is not a new thing.
This isn't even really a new use case. Decades ago a company could pay a human to monitor the videos and reach the same data analysis of when rooms are occupied, etc. The only thing different is the usage of automated technology to do the same thing.
What Boeing does have an issue with is a whistleblower complex. Everyone wants to leak some juicy internal tidbit, win a lawsuit, and be financially set for life. "Unnamed employees" should not be "sharing internal PowerPoint presentations" with the local press. This wasn't a secret management ploy, according to the article it was shared with employees a month ago.
This will result in LESS transparency and MORE employee monitoring. Boeing is an aerospace technology company and huge government / military contractor. Employees that run to the news press cannot be trusted. What other internal company secrets are they willing to share? Especially for the right price. Industrial espionage for unfriendly nation states can be tempting. And if everyone else is getting away with sharing secrets.....
Yeah, watch for more controls and employee restrictions coming soon. And next time they won't share the plans, they will just implement it. Employees just proved they cannot be trusted.
"What Boeing does have an issue with is a whistleblower complex”
And why might that be? Could it possibly be that Boeing have been engaged in some ‘behind the scenes, less than strictly legal’ activities and an employee, who may have a grudge or is possibly just publicly-minded, has reported this to the relevant authorities and/or the press, just to make sure than said ‘relevant authorities’ actually get off their backsides and act?
There is a massive, massive difference between calling out your employer for blatant worker's right violations and selling copies of the plans for their latest plane design to that nice ‘Mr Putin’. Don’t conflict the two! I’m going to suggest that the vast, vast majority of Boeing employees are ‘patriots’ love their country, but still aren’t going to tolerate being pissed around by by a bunch of, sorry, complete twats, masquerading as corporate executives!
Let’s be honest here, Boeing, like any other company, only exists because it has employees, piss them off enough, make a sufficiently hostile working environment that you can’t enough properly qualified and capable people, and the company simply will cease to exist in any meaningful way!
Now, full disclosure, as the lawyers like to say; I’m not American, I’m British - but I think our culture and shared understanding of ‘what is right or not’, are sufficiently similar that I feel able to comment. All let’s see - let the downvotes commence!
I temporarily worked for a company that used camera surveillance of employees in an open plan office area, allegedly for energy conservation purposes.
This was implemented despite resistance from the minions and the union - 'cos it's saving energy innit.
A number of cameras stopped working or displayed a strange pink or grey hue on the screens.
Chewing gum is remarkably difficult to remove from camera lenses.
Seems to me that Boeing is like a lot of other businesses who have offices but are not too clear how much of the office space is needed. Monitoring occupancy makes sense, as long as it's monitoring desks, not users. I've worked in offices crammed to the doors with desks, but never enough chairs. I've worked in offices that had my team huddled in one clutch amongst vast swathes of empty desks. And that was long before the pandemic.