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The Rise of Workplace Surveillance

theguardian.com

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Re: The Rise of Workplace Surveillance

#51

Post by chewbacha »

MisterTea wrote: post #26
chewbacha wrote: post #24

This makes work a panopticon prison. > The concept of the design is to allow all (pan-) inmates of an institution to be observed (-opticon) by a single watchman without the inmates being able to tell whether or not they are being watched. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

This is is automated, real time, omnipresent surveillance of everyone. It's worse than a panopticon as in a panopticon prison you have one person surveilling 1000 for example but only able to watch one at a time. The idea is the prisoners never know who is being watched so in theory they all behave thinking they are all being watched. But math kinda destroys that theory as they each have at least a 1000:1 chance of b…

True that this is worse! But you still don’t know if someone is going to be reading it or if it will be flagged. The relation I was trying to make to panopticon is that workers will live under constant fear.

In regards to the math, I don’t believe that humans perceive risk with such objectivity. If the cost of being observed is high, then even a low risk may impose constant anxiety. Of course, perhaps criminal behavior selects for a group that tends to undervalue the costs and under estimate the risk.

Re: The Rise of Workplace Surveillance

#52

Post by lotsofpulp »

throw2016 wrote: post #16
lotsofpulp wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except we’re getting better at quantifying, and the better we are at it, the more we can optimize. Factory workers didn’t use to be measured, but then they were. And now they’re automated. Many aspects of white collar jobs are not impervious to this either. As we move up the chain, we’ll see that even more can be measured and optimized, even for the decision makers. Just make sure you keep climbing! Edit: it also hel…

This is a bit of a straw man. You don't need surveillance technology for this. If a worker is expected to make 10 pieces of an item per hour its easy for managers to verify this. For a knowledge or creative worker it's similarly easy to verify expected performance. This is not new, workers have been measured for performance everywhere since manufacturing and corporate jobs began. If we ignore that for a moment, the p…

Anecdotally, I've seen plenty of managers subjected to their own set of metrics. They might be able to resist it longer, but the equity owners aren't going to just give them a pass. It's always a question of will the benefits be worth the cost, and as soon as it is, the axe will come down.

I don't agree that creative workers have similarly easy to verify metrics, even now. However, with the ability to broadly track information, what is now possible is to view the distributions of output so that over time, an individual loses the ability to provide excuses, because chances are if your constantly in the tail end, then it's probably worth it for the organization to be rid of you.

I would love it if could apply this transparency to our governance, but obviously those with power will oppose it, and those without will have to fight for it. It's just the nature of things. Obfuscation makes it easier to arbitrage (make excess profits, i.e. have more power than others), so it is to be expected that should continue.

Re: The Rise of Workplace Surveillance

#53

Post by Bartweiss »

gambiting wrote: post #39
pjc50 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this would only be legal in the UK if it was made clear that the communications were subject to monitoring; see https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisations/documents/1066/em... pp58 onwards. I can see it being argued both ways; transcripts of Bloomberg chat were a key part of the LIBOR scandal, for example. And I can also see there being some need to monitor internal chat in case it's used for unacceptable pur…

Like, I'm ok with my employer reading my work emails - that's obviously in my contract. But there's something really creepy about automated software that automatically flags messages/actions for review because they are "suspicious". Same with using my webcam to take pictures of me while I work.

There's a common pattern of suggesting that if an employer (or state, or university, or...) can access data, there's no problem when they do. I think it's a pretty serious error.

Broadly, automated surveillance creates illusory offenses. It raises issues based on some imperfect set of rules, and does so independent of any report of harm. (Add to that the likelihood of unethical flagging - which happened right in the article!)

And that creates an obligation to act for employers. Ignoring alerts, no matter how silly, is the sort of thing that might get cited as negligence when a real problem does come down the pike. At best, the result is time-consuming investigations of fake issues. At worst, corporate makes a decision that summary firings are an easier bet than proper investigations.

That's not just a hypothetical fear - we already hear about things like Amazon warehouse employees being laid off on vague suspicion of theft, because investigations are harder than replacing staff. Expanding always-active surveillance will predictably hurt innocents who already lack job security.

Re: The Rise of Workplace Surveillance

#54

Post by nickthemagicman »

matte_black wrote: post #49
albertgoeswoof wrote: post #17

Is this article a joke? "Last year an employee at an IT services company sent a private chat message to a friend at work worried that he had just shared his sexual identity with his manager in a meeting and fearing he’d face career reprisal. Wiretap detected the employee’s concern and alerted a senior company exec who was then able to intervene, talk to the manager and defuse the situation." What. the. fuck. thanks "…

Look at this from a company perspective. If it seems like someone is stealing documents, but you then discover they actually aren't, then no harm done. If someone actually was stealing documents however, and you don't have the surveillance to realize this, your best salesman might have just took off with a bunch of client information to go work at a competitor. You might never find out, and if you did, you might have…

A huge part of me hates the Big Brother aspect but then there's another part of me that thinks that if used properly having data is never really a bad thing and could possibly be used to make the company more efficient run better and address concerns of employees. Human nature really makes it difficult to trust that the data will be used positively though

Re: The Rise of Workplace Surveillance

#55

Post by tribune »

At a company with a healthy culture, managers should be hiring people who they trust to get their jobs done. If you feel the need to watch your employee's every move, why would you hire them in the first place? Treating employees like delinquent children instead of mature teammates indicates a very sick company culture that I would avoid at all costs.

Re: The Rise of Workplace Surveillance

#56

Post by dredmorbius »

I'm coming to the conclusion that, at a society scale, there's a fundamental conflict such that advances in communications technologies undermine trust.

This is a case of paradox of composition -- whilst at a personal scale improved communications can increase trust, at a mass scale, the tendency seems to be to undermine it. This increasingly strikes me as a problem.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6jqakv/communi...

In a world without high-speed, high-bandwidth, rapid, and reliable communications, you have to extend, and rely on, trust between individuals. Cultures evolve systems (usually religious) to create and foster a sufficiently-reliable trust network.

As communications improve, reliance on that trust diminishes. You no longer need to be able to rely on a person working in your interest for days, or weeks, or months, or years. You can check on them at a moment's notice. You can monitor them continuously, across a wide range of metrics, without their conscious awareness.

A domain built on Trust becomes instead Panopticon.

(Further discussions of trust: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=trust&restrict...)

Re: The Rise of Workplace Surveillance

#57

Post by Bartweiss »

MisterTea wrote: post #26
chewbacha wrote: post #24

This makes work a panopticon prison. > The concept of the design is to allow all (pan-) inmates of an institution to be observed (-opticon) by a single watchman without the inmates being able to tell whether or not they are being watched. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

This is is automated, real time, omnipresent surveillance of everyone. It's worse than a panopticon as in a panopticon prison you have one person surveilling 1000 for example but only able to watch one at a time. The idea is the prisoners never know who is being watched so in theory they all behave thinking they are all being watched. But math kinda destroys that theory as they each have at least a 1000:1 chance of b…

I've been thinking about this a lot lately.

Foucault was prescient about the sorts of harms panopticon would cause, and the metaphor is still an informative one. In particular, it was an insightful as to psychology under uncertain surveillance. But people are still calling it hyperbole when in fact we surpassed it years ago.

Panopticon had vulnerabilities: a brief or infrequent transgression could go uncaught, and an uncaught transgression could never be recovered. The current situation is that active surveillance can be applied algorithmically to everyone, and 100% of past data can be retained for later analysis. That's utterly unprecedented, and I don't think we've really done much to grapple with what it's going to mean.

Re: The Rise of Workplace Surveillance

#58

Post by greglindahl »

pjc50 wrote: post #37
throw2016 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bit of a straw man. You don't need surveillance technology for this. If a worker is expected to make 10 pieces of an item per hour its easy for managers to verify this. For a knowledge or creative worker it's similarly easy to verify expected performance. This is not new, workers have been measured for performance everywhere since manufacturing and corporate jobs began. If we ignore that for a moment, the p…

> For a knowledge or creative worker it's similarly easy to verify expected performance. No it really isn't! Coding performance metrics are a wasteland of failed techniques.

ObDilbert: http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-13

"I'm gonna write me a new minivan this afternoon!"

Re: The Rise of Workplace Surveillance

#59

Post by Bartweiss »

dredmorbius wrote: post #56

I'm coming to the conclusion that, at a society scale , there's a fundamental conflict such that advances in communications technologies undermine trust . This is a case of paradox of composition -- whilst at a personal scale improved communications can increase trust, at a mass scale, the tendency seems to be to undermine it. This increasingly strikes me as a problem. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6j…

This ties interestingly to the news about Bitcoin power usage from last week: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mi...

The beauty of Bitcoin is an inherently-trustworthy transaction structure without the need for a central authority or trust between parties. The cost is exactly what you describe - trust is replaced by a massive expenditure of work to independently verify everything. It's an interesting microcosm of what's happening throughout society in general.

Re: The Rise of Workplace Surveillance

#60

Post by dredmorbius »

MisterTea wrote: post #26
chewbacha wrote: post #24

This makes work a panopticon prison. > The concept of the design is to allow all (pan-) inmates of an institution to be observed (-opticon) by a single watchman without the inmates being able to tell whether or not they are being watched. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

This is is automated, real time, omnipresent surveillance of everyone. It's worse than a panopticon as in a panopticon prison you have one person surveilling 1000 for example but only able to watch one at a time. The idea is the prisoners never know who is being watched so in theory they all behave thinking they are all being watched. But math kinda destroys that theory as they each have at least a 1000:1 chance of b…

That's a good point but even a total surveillance system has limits of actionability. Any given response system or mechanism is going to have limits of attention that it can apply to actual and justifiably observed behaviour. That is, if the goal is to identify, and reduce, negative behaviours, then whatever it is that your policing mechanism is can only act on some n cases in any given period of time.

The problem is that reducing negative behaviours in a just fashion is not the only, or even the most likely, possible dynamic for such a system. In a tyrannical regime (political, social, economic: this is not strictly related to politics), there's a great deal of power and control to be had by acting arbitrarily, without predictability, and without recourse, at any given time.

Take the example given in Paths of Glory, a 1957 film telling the story of the (arbitrary) execution of three French soldiers who had refused to undertake suicidal attacks in the trench warfare of World War I. The process draws on the ancient tradition of decimation, which is the arbitrary killing of one in ten of ones own troops* in order to instill on the remainder the consequences of failure to follow command.

The real risk of global surveillance is that it provides either the justification for, or the plausibility of justification for, arbitrary prosecution of any given individual at any given time.

That's an absolutely despotic state.

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