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

cnbc.com

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

#81

Post by pjlegato »

earthwalker99 wrote: post #24
freedomben wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, your comment is interesting. Just want to clarify on something as we might have different definitions/understanding. > Workers rights have never been won without a militant organized labor force. Just in the past few years, many companies have started giving generous paternal/maternal leave policies. Which militant organization brought that change about? Or would you not consider that to be workers rights? If…

> Just in the past few years, many companies have started giving generous paternal/maternal leave policies. Try passing these paternity leave policies as a law and see which side those companies are on then. You will quickly get a taste of reality. Capital loves to perform generosity when they retain the power to stop at a moment's notice and lay everybody off with no cause. The 40 hour work week was won with nothing…

> Try passing these paternity leave policies as a law

These policies have been the law for many years in the United States, both at the federal level and (additionally and seperately) at the state level in nearly all states:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave_in_the_United_S...

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

#82

Post by reaperman »

neilv wrote: post #39
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'll add one. (Not just talking about the immediate employee surveillance tech, but various questionable tech we develop and use, and slippery slopes going forward) 5. Consider the development or use of evil tech to reflect poorly upon the people involved. Like in an interview: "I see you were a developer at Dystopitools..." or "I see you were a manager at Megajerco..." "I wasn't in the evildoing department" might be…

I’d consider salaries and such too. It seems reasonably likely that someone making $200,000 has many options for work and is choosing money over morals.

Someone making $70,000 or on an H1B may not have other options in this field, may face hundreds of applications before getting another interview.

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

#83

Post by tackypenguin »

I can only speak to one of the mentioned companies as I worked in this vertical, this has been happening for years across every communication platform. Companies like Symantec, ForcePoint and ProofPoint offer these features out of the box. Setting up rules is as easy as creating a list of keywords or phrases. It is all done under the guise of “treat protection,” meaning if you send a message on teams saying “I’m about to kill this presentation” know a analyst is going look through everything you’ve done in the last 3 months. This includes file movement, internet history, sent messages, emails, screen recordings, and lots of other things. IMO these products are legal corporate malware. In my experience they are mostly used to track people who are about to be laid off.

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

#85

Post by __loam »

williamcotton wrote: post #69
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…

The concept of the public space is also eroding and it is overshadowed on these forums by privacy advocates. Privacy is indeed important but only up to the limit that it intrudes upon the public accountability necessary for a republic to function. We seem fine with letting governments and large corporations know where we live and how much we pay in taxes yet are hesitant to make this information public due to fear of…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MD_CMrCpBMc

Our cities are missing third places.

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

#86

Post by __loam »

Erratic6576 wrote: post #22
bagels wrote: post #16

Will it be used to find union organizers? Walmart and Starbucks have been in the news for suppressing labor organization.

And Tesla, and Apple, and Amazon “There’s a class warfare and mine is winning” WB

The games industry meanwhile is going through massive layoffs and demonstrating the need for union power.

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

#87

Post by jurynulifcation »

tomcam wrote: post #63
jurynulifcation wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Privacy matters at work because the interests of the employee and the employer are in tension. Do you expect an employee to leave every personal item out of work? Should employees expect to not speak of their personal lives, or to have artifacts of their personal life leak into the workplace? To say that the boundary should be absolute is hopelessly naive. Privacy matters because it is a leaky barrier, and the employ…

I kind of do expect expect to leave their private matters at home. Or the very least, to handle them during break time on their own phones. This does not seem at all oppressive to me.

And in the ideal world, that's fine, but again- hopelessly naive in the real world. Taken to the extreme, why should we not record all audio? And if someone receives an urgent phone call from home, something extremely personal, should that stay in the company's records? No, for fear that the company will use their power disparity to exert undue control over the employee's life from them attending to the actually important matters in their life. That's why privacy matters.

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

#88

Post by linehedonist »

tackypenguin wrote: post #83

I can only speak to one of the mentioned companies as I worked in this vertical, this has been happening for years across every communication platform. Companies like Symantec, ForcePoint and ProofPoint offer these features out of the box. Setting up rules is as easy as creating a list of keywords or phrases. It is all done under the guise of “treat protection,” meaning if you send a message on teams saying “I’m abou…

*threat protection, I think. I at least was confused for a second

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

#89

Post by hakfoo »

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…

I blame a lot of it on the mass adoption of stock-based investment and retirement plans.

With defined-benefit pensions and even traditional bond-based investments, the narrative is "The company has an obligation to me for very specific deliverables, even if that means reduced investor return." There's an appropriately adversarial relationship there, which keeps everyone behaving better.

With stock investments, people conclude "my personal success- even survival- is inextricably linked with how good the company looks to Wall Street." This incentivizes sycophantism.

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

#90

Post by thesuavefactor »

sleight42 wrote: post #76
infamouscow wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

> 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.

Exactly. I was browsing LinkedIn this week when I stumbled in this gem: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/samfjacobs_last-month-i-was-a...

So what he's saying is that he got together with 130+ other CEOs, who combined will probably make millions if not billions, bitching that the people who do the actual grunt work (and make a couple of thousand a month) aren't putting in extra hours or looking at their work mail on weekends.

This is so far from reality it's staggering. I work with, and among young developers every day. I'm in my forties and I've done so for most of ny career. Beyond a healthy work life balance they are just sick of working without a fair share of the benefits.

These people aren't less prone to work hard, they just don't want to work hard to make extremely wealthy people more wealthy.

Some are working less for their employer, and in the meantime are working for themselves to create new disruptive startups.

The article says CEOs are "worried", but it also states that these workers should fear for their jobs because they are going to be made obsolete by AI.

The reality is that small companies can get much more work done in less time than big ones, I have worked for both. The bigger a company gets, the slower it becomes.

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