On workplace surveillance / "bossware": > Mazzoli seems to have either not used his product, or, if he did, did so under conditions where he was in charge of it – using it the way an athlete might use a stopwatch to time their own sprints, and not the way a boss might: to decide whether to dock your pay or fire you. > This inability to understand the difference between using a technology and having the same technolog…
Once upon a time, I worked for a shop that did auto insurance. This involves handling a lot of fairly sensitive data about people and datasets about a lot of people, for reasons that boil down to it being incredibly useful data for actuarial purposes. Bossware, or working machine monitoring software, endpoint monitoring, or whatever turned out to be a key part of making it possible for our data scientists to function…
Meanwhile this data is getting leaked every other week by other companies. Didn't Equifax leak pretty much all sensitive information for the entire nation. What happened there?
I haven't formed a constructive thought out of all this yet, I'm just frustrated that we'll get surveillance software to allegedly protect data that's already been leaked by a hundred other companies.
Often this will be like the "think of the children" argument. Of course we should be concerned about security and make efforts to protect data, but many times the same people who push surveillance software in the name of security will later turn a blind eye to other security practices or concerns that might be an inconvenience to them. Their concern for security will extend only as far as it gives them power.