WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)
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WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)
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Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)
#2Always request a separate laptop and phone for work, and always create a separate set of accounts.
Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)
#3Minds too small to fathom Goodhart’s law.
Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)
#4Every time one of these stories comes out I sigh a little and conclude that it's more showing the failure of modern management practices and the legal environments these companies are required to operate in than anything about employee responsibility.
Companies should be judging their people by results. If someone's performance is acceptable then all of these surveillance metrics don't matter. If someone's performance is not acceptable then all of these surveillance metrics still don't matter. If the company can't tell if an employee's performance is acceptable then maybe that's something they should think about first.
Some of the nastier management practices are also CYA policies because of potential liability if the employee does something they shouldn't or suffers some harm personally while working from home and the company is held responsible even if there was little it could or should practically do to avoid the harm. It seems likely that some of our legal frameworks for employment relationships are outdated in the WFH era and could benefit from review. It should be clear what responsibilities an employer has to a WFH employee - for example providing WFH staff with suitable equipment to do their job properly and safely - but I don't think we should burden employers with responsibility for bad things that happen beyond their reasonable control. Maybe some of the perceived need for these aggressive and often covert surveillance measures goes away if some of the arguably unreasonable liabilities for bad things happening are also taken away.
Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)
#5I don’t have an issue being monitored if it means I can work from home more frequently. I think the data would help highlight that I’m more productive working from home than in the office due to less distractions and wasted commute time.
It would be helpful if firms monitoring productivity mentioned what they consider productivity to be. However, in doing this, it would also make it easy for individuals to game any productivity metrics.
It’s interesting that Teams tracks which device you join meetings on. I start my day on my work laptop around 7AM and my daily standup is at 9:30AM. I typically join the standup on my phone, and make coffee and have a snack. Our standup runs 30-45mins due to how it’s managed and doesn’t provide much value to me. I’m present and engaged during that time, but I wonder if it could be interpreted as me “joining a meeting from bed” as suggested in the article. I see it as a productivity gain as I can have my coffee break while still attending the standup.
Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)
#6Now that Microsoft owns LinkedIn, I wouldn't trust them one bit to keep your activity there away from your employer. It would be really easy to correlate your sentiment analysis on Teams/email against your LI messaging traffic.
Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)
#7Full disclosure. I just built this for Google Workspace (www.gofasterhq.com). I built it because it's a tool I wish I had when managing teams in the past.
These articles are very one sided and there is a productive middle ground to be established using productivity management tools. As a manager, it can be difficult to know what your team is working on and who is actually productive, especially in a remote environment. Replace the word "spy" in this article with "hold accountable" and it doesn't sound so bad all of the sudden. But with that visibility, the manager also needs to understand the context in which the data is generated. Whether somebody is productive isn't only a matter of metrics, but also their role, their seniority, and what it is they are expected to do.
As an employee, these tools can benefit you by weeding out teammates who present themselves confidently, but don't actually do much. With a good manager, you should be able to simply do your job and the metrics, in context, take care of themselves.
Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)
#8Full disclosure. I just built this for Google Workspace (www.gofasterhq.com). I built it because it's a tool I wish I had when managing teams in the past. These articles are very one sided and there is a productive middle ground to be established using productivity management tools. As a manager, it can be difficult to know what your team is working on and who is actually productive, especially in a remote environmen…
Benefit of surveillance over checking their deliverables, go.
Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)
#9Now that Microsoft owns LinkedIn, I wouldn't trust them one bit to keep your activity there away from your employer. It would be really easy to correlate your sentiment analysis on Teams/email against your LI messaging traffic.
Fortunately in at least some parts of the world providing personal data based on use of LinkedIn to a third party like an employer who happened to use other Microsoft products would clearly violate legal data protection rules and potentially land both Microsoft and the employer with expensive penalties. It's not the same situation as an employer providing an IT facility to their own employees so they can do their jobs but then having morally and perhaps legally questionable abilities to perform covert surveillance of how the employees use that facility.
Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)
#10Contracts between parties with asymmetrical power often require collective bargaining (regulation, reputation, unions, insurance) to design systems that meet the long-term needs of all participants. Compare the terms of EU-US data sovereignty negotiations, or corporation-corporation data rooms, with corporation-employee agreements.
Given the rate of change in surveillance telemetry, AI local/remote analytics, enterprise sysadmin competence, global threat models and "chat control" draft legislation to bypass E2EE confidentiality, it is unlikely that individual humans can negotiate balanced Terms-of-Service/Employment/Citizenship.
There are OSS-based systems (QubesOS, OpenXT, Android pKVM nested-virt replacement of TrustZone) which are architecturally compatible with remote management of isolated workloads by mutually-distrusting clouds and enterprises. This is the WFH inverse of cloud "confidential computing". Workload isolation is hard/intractable on pre-CHERI PC hardware that is littered with side channels and legacy complexity, but isolation of mutually-distrusting clouds can be practical with a combination of monitoring and legal agreements. WFH humans can collaborate on OSS code to enforce OSS legal agreements that mediate between employees and corporations.
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck's Incorporated (2017) TV series, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7eKEHhSw00 & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporated_(TV_series), includes thought experiments on future workplace surveillance.
> The series takes place in a dystopian Milwaukee in the year 2074, where many countries have gone bankrupt .. In the absence of effective government, powerful multinational corporations have become de facto governments, controlling areas called Green Zones. The remaining territories are called Red Zones, where governance is weak or non-existent.
Wi-Fi 7 Sensing routers (2024) can generate 3D images of human activity through the walls/floor/ceiling of homes and business, profiling human position, movements, breathing, typing, emotion and more, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34480760. After standardization by IEEE in consumer routers, which remote parties would be interested in WFH WiFi Sensing Analytics? How could regulators, employers, employees and home-builders respond?