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Bossware is a big legal risk

kolide.com

21–30 of 227 posts

Re: Bossware is a big legal risk

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because workers arent slaves or robots, and being on the job doesnt make them such. Your mentality is actually staggering to me.

Can you answer this question directly: What is it that you don't want seen by a company representative, on a company computer, while being paid by the company?

Anything in my home, any traffic on my home network, and any sounds in my home that aren’t me directly talking to a coworker about work matters.

Re: Bossware is a big legal risk

#22
post #4

So how do I know if my work computer features such surveillance?

Just assume it does

No kidding!

We have some ridiculous timeout on our work machines that triggers the screensaver after 2 minutes of idle time (we can’t change this).

After it’s triggered, you need to enter your password to unlock (company mandated, 10 chars minimum, no repeating chars, at least 1 upper and 1 lower case char, at least 1 special symbol, change every 90 days, can't be too similar to last 10(!) passwords).

Okay, this is annoying. So, for the longest time, I used an open source mouse jiggler app (basically simulated cursor movement).

This worked fine until a recent software update. I wondered why my screen saver was being triggered again. Oh, the mouse jiggler isn’t running! Let’s open it up.

A big dialog box appears on the screen: “THIS APPLICATION VIOLATES COMPANY POLICY AND ITS USAGE HAS BEEN REPORTED.”

Oh… cool.

I went on Amazon and ordered some $5 hardware mouse jiggler dongle. That worked for about a month or so.

Then suddenly, I started getting CrowdStrike notifications: “Functions of a USB device were restricted according to company policy.”

Fun times!

It’s only a matter of time until Zoom starts sending reports of whether I had the window in focus or not during meetings with management.

Re: Bossware is a big legal risk

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you answer this question directly: What is it that you don't want seen by a company representative, on a company computer, while being paid by the company?

How would you feel about audio recording in break rooms and hallways? How about fart-detectors in the chairs, recording all that to some database? Same idea, and maybe you wouldn’t mind but surely you can see why many people would. FWIW enough people do mind that this kind of thing is illegal in some countries.

Ironically, I'm involved with a startup developing fart monitors as we speak. I'm certain it's going to be a huge market. /s

Re: Bossware is a big legal risk

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because workers arent slaves or robots, and being on the job doesnt make them such. Your mentality is actually staggering to me.

Can you answer this question directly: What is it that you don't want seen by a company representative, on a company computer, while being paid by the company?

Anything, I'm paid as a developer I'm not paid as an actor.

Re: Bossware is a big legal risk

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because workers arent slaves or robots, and being on the job doesnt make them such. Your mentality is actually staggering to me.

Can you answer this question directly: What is it that you don't want seen by a company representative, on a company computer, while being paid by the company?

Yesterday I was working and my three year old came running -- directly out of the shower -- into the room to show me her doll's "new hairstyle".

Can you answer this directly: How many people's computers, servers, and backups should video of my child be on?

Re: Bossware is a big legal risk

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because workers arent slaves or robots, and being on the job doesnt make them such. Your mentality is actually staggering to me.

Can you answer this question directly: What is it that you don't want seen by a company representative, on a company computer, while being paid by the company?

My concern is that workers who produce the desired output for their company, ie perform the labor they are paid to perform, will not be able to use excess time to be with their family, take care of chores, rest, or otherwise live life, and will instead need to pretend to be busy as though they’re still in an office under the watchful eye of an overpaid manager. Monitoring should be reserved exclusively for cases where an employee’s output is not measurable in any other way, and should then be kept to a minimum. If we exclude the possibility of webcam or audio monitoring, then my primary concern is that a worker will be made to waste their time satisfying the arbitrary metric by which present-ness on their company computer is measured, and so the thing I am worried about being seen is the absence of activity.

Re: Bossware is a big legal risk

#27
First time i've looked at kolide in a couple of years, and two things jumped out at me:

  - They got acquired by 1Password
  - They've pivoted away from a managed osquery product.
A few years ago, I wanted to throw money at kolide to manage compliance in a large enterprise using osquery, but their product/sales team was quite underwhelming. Whilst we were testing it, they switched to requiring slack integration as their control and management plane and wouldn't support the existing workflow... So I had to reluctantly drop them.

Re: Bossware is a big legal risk

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because workers arent slaves or robots, and being on the job doesnt make them such. Your mentality is actually staggering to me.

Can you answer this question directly: What is it that you don't want seen by a company representative, on a company computer, while being paid by the company?

Different person here, but: literally anything. I don't have "anything to hide," but I don't trust the company's judgment (or, more specifically, that of every possible "company representative." It only takes one to make something a federal fucking issue.)

If I do a google search for "cake toppers for lesbian wedding" while my code's compiling, that's morally fine. But if a bored "company representative" decides to take offense to that, now it's a whole goddamn situation that I have to deal with.

Or if I'm on Stack Overflow to copy&paste, and one of the "Hot Network Questions" in the sidebar has an "offensive" phrase in it, is it going to trip their automated flagging criteria?

Re: Bossware is a big legal risk

#29

I was surprised (perhaps I shouldn't have been) to encounter bossware-like surveilance in an interview process . About 6 months ago I was interviewing with InterSystems, a company that does healthcare software. Only when I signed in for the online coding interview did I learn that they required I have a webcam on myself the whole time. I don't like using coarse language. But it was the first time I struggled to not u…

Do these companies support Linux or do these recruiters only go after Windows users? There are of course lots of perfectly fine technical folks who are windows-centric, but it still seems like a pretty bad filter to apply to their candidate pool.

Re: Bossware is a big legal risk

#30

I was surprised (perhaps I shouldn't have been) to encounter bossware-like surveilance in an interview process . About 6 months ago I was interviewing with InterSystems, a company that does healthcare software. Only when I signed in for the online coding interview did I learn that they required I have a webcam on myself the whole time. I don't like using coarse language. But it was the first time I struggled to not u…

Wait just during the interview? That actually sounds completely reasonable.
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