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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

#91

Post by tackypenguin »

linehedonist wrote: post #88
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

Yep, my bad.

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

#92

Post by czl »

_8j50 wrote: post #74
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…

> 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.

Also using your work cellphone? Which country is this? Any experts on law have an opinion on this?

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

#93

Post by nielsbot »

bagels wrote: post #16

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

I’d bet serious money on yes. Amazon and Starbucks are incredibly anti-union. Unions scare them—unions mean shareholders and execs would be forced to share more profits with their workers. (The horror!)

Just one example: Even though workers have won unions at Amazon and Starbucks shops, the companies are plain refusing to negotiate contracts with them as is right.

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

#95

Post by bart_spoon »

bagels wrote: post #16

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

I guarantee it. My first impression when seeing this list of companies is that is likely the primary purpose.

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

#96

Post by arrrg »

analog31 wrote: post #30
arrrg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any kind of communication surveillance that goes beyond monitoring for malware and data exhilaration, especially for monitoring performance, would be completely unthinkable at my (German) employer. The employee council would never ever agree to that. It‘s not at all obvious that the moral perspective you present as obvious actually is.

I'll make sure to include at least one German colleague in all of my Teams chats. ;-)

Well it‘s not automatic. You need workers/employees to care and take action for this to be something about which I can then say “this would never fly where I work”. And you need the legal framework and cultural norms that support something like that. So not to say it‘s easy.

My point here is that sometimes in theses discussions there seems to be a sort of first principles view of the employee-employer relationship where it is taken as axiomatic that anything you do as an employee (and sometimes even beyond) is for the employer to take and do with whatever they want unconditionally.

My point is that that doesn’t need to be the obviously true axiom it sometimes seems to be.

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

#97

Post by paulmd »

hakfoo wrote: post #89
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…

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…

I think that's a very tech-centric (and specifically FAANG-centric) mindset, most people are not getting RSOs or options and aren't under any impression their fate is entwined with the stock price.

on the other hand you are right that the idea of corporations as independent, self-directed profit-seeking entities with no other social responsibilities or responsibilities to their employees etc has finally subsumed us totally. Corporations are living entities, they are are social organisms. Just like a single bee is not (itself) a living organism (cannot reproduce or shelter itself, etc), but rather the bee colony is the life-form there. Corporations are living systems of rules and incentives - memeplexes.

Paperclip maximizers already exist, and the outcome we have given them is "stock price goes up". Until something is changed about allowing the existence of unrestrained paperclip maximizers, they will continue to maximize and do their best to eat society and turn it into paperclips.

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

#98

Post by jstarfish »

alwa wrote: post #57
sandworm101 wrote: post #6

Ok, exactly which communications does this AI monitor? This seems to be internal corporate coms (corporate email, internal chats) which are not subject to privacy. But the article is very unclear, leaving the reader to assume that they are monitoring social media or something else external to the organization. Internal company communcation channels are open to inspection by the company. Whether that company wants to…

There’s also the Goodhart-flavored line of argument here: at the moment, part of the sales pitch is that these internal conversation channels provide a meaningful view into staff’s reactions, dynamics, and states of mind. Fire the first few folks for their AI-detected “toxicity,” and one imagines the wiser of their “toxic” friends will find other avenues for their bad behavior. Use sentiment analysis to sound out and…

> imagine a constructive management environment, where the “mothership” worries

I think this is limited to the realm of imagination. It will never happen.

There is nothing maternal or caring about modern enterprise. Caring is an act of sacrifice-- giving more than you take.

Even charities don't "care," the leaders make bank through arbitrage/exploitation of other people's empathy.

Introspection does not generate revenue. At best it generates goodwill, until the next CEO cashes out on it a decade later and screws everyone anyway.

> part of the sales pitch is that these internal conversation channels provide a meaningful view into staff’s reactions, dynamics, and states of mind.

This really isn't a good thing, at all. It's that social media paradigm where you figure out how to keep the audience maximally-engaged without driving them away. It sounds like a beneficial thing but only ever amounts to assessing "what can I get away with before they mutiny?" It's not a sign of good leadership, it's the playbook of a carnival worker.

I do internal investigations. Half of me wishes we had this visibility for obvious reason. The other half dreads the implications of actually having it.

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

#99

Post by jstarfish »

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)…

I agree in spirit, but their pessimism is borne from sounding the alarm early and still failing to avert a trainwreck. It's understandably demoralizing.

They did offer a list of possible solutions despite that. They're trying.

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

#100

Post by jstarfish »

throwup238 wrote: post #26
analog31 wrote: post #10

>>>> Using the anonymized data in Aware’s analytics product, clients can see how employees of a certain age group or in a particular geography are responding to a new corporate policy or marketing campaign >>>> “It won’t have names of people, to protect the privacy,” Schumann said. Rather, he said, clients will see that “maybe the workforce over the age of 40 in this part of the United States is seeing the changes to…

If that's the intention everyone who uses this software opens themselves up to age discrimination lawsuits (40 years of age is the cutoff). This is either a really dumb way to market a product or it's actually meant to detect those discriminatory policies so employers can undo them before someone decides to sue.

No, this is the "safe" way to discriminate without explicitly saying "we don't like you."

Case in point, look at Atlanta. Mandatory drug testing is still a thing, and they're averse to hiring anybody with a criminal conviction. If you really want to be nasty, you set up office far away from the nearest MARTA line. Altogether, you'll get very few minority applicants.

What discriminatory practice would you sue over? They drug test everyone, turn away all convicts, and you can't compel a company to be accessible by public transit.

So in the quote, gee, this policy being "really unpopular with those over 40" is how you drive them out. Being very intolerant of family/outside emergencies is another way.

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