I'm all for privacy and I cringe at the idea of workplace surveillance of the type described. That said, this article is loaded with false comparisons and poor analogies and just doesn't make its point very well. In general, it confuses "The Bad Government want to intentionally surveil you" with "idiot corporations chasing profits incidentally surveil you and think you're enough of an idiot to swallow it".
> 20 years ago, if you were eating your dinner under the unblinking eye of a video-camera, it was because you were in a supermax prison.
Or a shopping mall. Or an airport. Or a convenience store. Or the lobby of a hotel. Or a bank. Or about a million other places.
> Now, thanks to "luxury surveillance," you can get the same experience in your middle-class home with your Google, Apple or Amazon "smart" camera. Those cameras climbed the curve, going from prisons to schools to workplaces to homes.
This is a fundamentally inaccurate comparison. Nobody is forcing anyone to get a "smart" camera. I don't own one and I never will. Mandatory surveillance at work or in public is not the same issue as mandatory surveillance in private. This also totally ignores the fact that people aren't buying surveillance devices because they surveil. They're buying them for other reasons. Also, there's no "Them" out in the world making this all happen. It's natural evolution as technologies evolve and change. There's no conspiracy, just a lot of not particularly bright ideas colliding at once.
What we should be talking about are all the forms of surveillance people don't opt into - abuse of the cameras on your phone, laptop, etc. The scary thing, to me, is not "what will this technology you chose to acquire do when working as intended" but "how will forces you can't control subvert the things you have for other reasons."