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Walmart, Delta, and Starbucks are using AI to monitor employee messages

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Re: Walmart, Delta, and Starbucks are using AI to monitor employee messages

#71

Post by respectmysoa »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #65
xyst wrote: post #53

US PATRIOT Act essentially normalized domestic spying with FISA courts rubber stamping warrants in the name of “war on terror”. Privacy advocates lost once those towers fell on 2001-09-11. Millennials pushed the aging fossils into the digital world (e-banking/mobile banking, almost everything is digitalized today). Social media changed the way we interact with people. The concept of privacy continues to erode. Gen Z…

You're making it sound like there's some kind of plan behind it. There is no conspiracy. There won't be a direct "skip the middleman" totalitarian level, because governments are too busy chasing their own tails and smelling the farts in a 4-year election cycle to consider anything of a broader scope. Meanwhile, private companies are chasing easy money at the expense of anything that's good, honest or nice, like they…

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Re: Walmart, Delta, and Starbucks are using AI to monitor employee messages

#72

Post by sleight42 »

laurex wrote: post #50

People often underestimate the effects of losing privacy. A lot of comments here seem to reflect the idea that “If I’m employed by CompanyY then I’m owned by them.” We are spending a majority of our waking hours working, often, and being trained to believe that an authority’s ownership of technical systems means that not only everything we do with other people via those systems belongs to an employer, but that our in…

In some ways, these businesses are akin to the CCCP: they want to own our hearts and minds.

They want our whole selves. They want every drop of what they can get out of us.

This is so often what they mean when they say that they want people who are "passionate" about the work. They want us obsessed and fixated.

So they want to more than own us.

This isn't all businesses but increasingly this is becoming normalized.

Re: Walmart, Delta, and Starbucks are using AI to monitor employee messages

#73

Post by respectmysoa »

coldtea wrote: post #60
xyst wrote: post #53

US PATRIOT Act essentially normalized domestic spying with FISA courts rubber stamping warrants in the name of “war on terror”. Privacy advocates lost once those towers fell on 2001-09-11. Millennials pushed the aging fossils into the digital world (e-banking/mobile banking, almost everything is digitalized today). Social media changed the way we interact with people. The concept of privacy continues to erode. Gen Z…

> Skip the middleman (private companies vacuuming up all the data and selling to govt). Why skip it? Keep it and enlarge it. Then you get to have your cake (total surveilance) and eat it too (it's not the government doing it! we're just buying those private sector data). Same way you can censor as a government and still be all about "free speech"! You just let the private sector do the censoring - with a little carro…

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Re: Walmart, Delta, and Starbucks are using AI to monitor employee messages

#74

Post by _8j50 »

laurex wrote: post #50

People often underestimate the effects of losing privacy. A lot of comments here seem to reflect the idea that “If I’m employed by CompanyY then I’m owned by them.” We are spending a majority of our waking hours working, often, and being trained to believe that an authority’s ownership of technical systems means that not only everything we do with other people via those systems belongs to an employer, but that our in…

I don't know what you and others are on about. Work systems have no expectation of privacy. Just how it is.

If there was a law where certain types of communication had expectation of privacy, similar to how toilets at work have an expectation of privacy, that'd be nice. Some countries like Germany do have this, it's not always a good thing but if that's what you want then have your state's lawmakers pass that law.

I worked in environments where hot mic's and cameras are being used to monitor what we say and do in addition to screen recording, chat monitoring (slack,teams,etc... all have a feature), browser monitoring,etc... and that's just the tip of the ice berg, the layers of shady shit they do, because in their messed up heads employee and slave are not all that different, is endless. Is it illegal? That's the wrong question, the right question is obviously most people don't want any of this because it is against their advantage, but can the government which derives it's power and authority from most people represent them and legislate to begin with? The answer is no it cannot.

Can my employer record conversations and video using my work laptop in my home, I mean just petty managers not even for a legitimate inquiry? Yes, they can get away with that. Why is there no law to govern this? Because legislation does not follow the will of the people, it follows the will of fund raisers.

Companies are people too but with bigger political contributions. "For the people, by the people, of the people", people in that context now means mostly corporate persons and their interest trumps the individuals'.

Re: Walmart, Delta, and Starbucks are using AI to monitor employee messages

#75

Post by infamouscow »

sleight42 wrote: post #72
laurex wrote: post #50

People often underestimate the effects of losing privacy. A lot of comments here seem to reflect the idea that “If I’m employed by CompanyY then I’m owned by them.” We are spending a majority of our waking hours working, often, and being trained to believe that an authority’s ownership of technical systems means that not only everything we do with other people via those systems belongs to an employer, but that our in…

In some ways, these businesses are akin to the CCCP: they want to own our hearts and minds. They want our whole selves. They want every drop of what they can get out of us. This is so often what they mean when they say that they want people who are "passionate" about the work. They want us obsessed and fixated. So they want to more than own us. This isn't all businesses but increasingly this is becoming normalized.

This only happens because people allow it.

If these same businesses all decided they were going to take your first born as collateral, I suspect a lot of CEOs and chairmen would be swinging from lamp posts (as they should) within a week.

Personally, I would do far worse to such scumbags -- things that are not only (somehow) illegal to describe, but would likely get plenty of downvotes by the most milquetoast and pathetic. Things that up until the last 100 years, would have been regarded as normal for the entirety of recorded human history.

Re: Walmart, Delta, and Starbucks are using AI to monitor employee messages

#76

Post by sleight42 »

infamouscow wrote: post #75
sleight42 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some ways, these businesses are akin to the CCCP: they want to own our hearts and minds. They want our whole selves. They want every drop of what they can get out of us. This is so often what they mean when they say that they want people who are "passionate" about the work. They want us obsessed and fixated. So they want to more than own us. This isn't all businesses but increasingly this is becoming normalized.

This only happens because people allow it. If these same businesses all decided they were going to take your first born as collateral, I suspect a lot of CEOs and chairmen would be swinging from lamp posts (as they should) within a week. Personally, I would do far worse to such scumbags -- things that are not only (somehow) illegal to describe, but would likely get plenty of downvotes by the most milquetoast and path…

Sure. Now.

It's an Overton Window. Business executives and their big investors are the feudal overlords who are decreasingly benevolent liege lords.

What is abhorrent now slowly becomes normalized. Look at CEOs who said, shortly after some of the more brutal start opining about how everyone needs to RTO or GTFO At least one of those CEOs said they needed a bit more Elon in them. They meant his ruthlessness with his employees.

And the window moves.

Re: Walmart, Delta, and Starbucks are using AI to monitor employee messages

#77

Post by kilolima »

Corporate workplace spying on employee communication became prevalent in the 90s to prevent discrimination lawsuits. This predates what we think of as our contemporary "surveilance capitalism". There were a series of court decisions that enshrined this practice in law and since then the limits of proscribed speech have expanded.

"The Unwanted Gaze" is a good read on this subject. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/157389/the-unwanted...>

Re: Walmart, Delta, and Starbucks are using AI to monitor employee messages

#78

Post by al_borland »

devsda wrote: post #52
happytiger wrote: post #43

The real value if removing encryption is access for AI. If we don’t have a comprehensive privacy legislation, something like a bill of rights for privacy, tied to individuals, AI will become a tool of totalitarianism and total information thought control. Full stop. You can look at it though todays lens and argue this is just another application of machine learning, but it isn’t just a slippery slope but becomes a la…

Slowly Privacy is being redefined by many tech companies as "Your data is completely private and will never be viewed by any human". That's corporate speak for "we will analyze your data by all other available means" and AI is the perfect tool for that.

I’d almost rather have the human. At least humans can forget.

Re: Walmart, Delta, and Starbucks are using AI to monitor employee messages

#79

Post by sigsegv420 »

wolverine876 wrote: post #62
freedomben wrote: post #8

As much as this turns my stomach, this is neither new nor unexpected, and honestly this is fairly benign to many of the things that companies do such as precision location tracking throughout the building, using company-issued phones, and using normal security surveillance to monitor "watercooler" talk and things like that. We had our chance to push back against company surveillance well over a decade ago, and nobody…

> I am pessimistic ... etc Your problem is not management, it's you (if this comment represents you) and your kind. The comment is lazy and just following an absurd fashion: wallowing in despair. Your advice is useless unless people organize and act. You need to do better; we need to do better. Though management could not ask for a 'better' worker, a better agent even (I don't think you are, but you might as well be)…

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Re: Walmart, Delta, and Starbucks are using AI to monitor employee messages

#80

Post by sigsegv420 »

electroly wrote: post #31
voidhorse wrote: post #2

Do we just call all of statistics "AI" now? I fail to see how or why applying basic machine learning techniques for data analysis is "artificial intelligence". This idea that intellection is nothing more than pattern matching is silly and needs to die. Conceptual understanding entails more than just pattern matching.

The AI part is the sentiment analysis of the chat message text and pictures. They're using statistics on the resulting aggregate data. This seems pretty reasonable to me. ML is roughly a gazillion times better than traditional NLP techniques for sentiment analysis. If you're doing sentiment analysis without ML in 2024 then you need to stop and reevaluate what you're doing. If you simply wanted to complain that they'r…

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