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A CCTV Company Is Paying Remote Workers In India To Yell At Armed Robbers (vice.com) 72

Posted by BeauHD from the all-in-the-name-of-safety dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: In a short CCTV video, a clerk at a small convenience store can be seen taking a bottle of coffee from a cooler and drinking it. When he returns to the cash register, an unseen person's voice emits from a speaker on the ceiling and interrogates him about whether he scanned and paid for the item. In another video, a cashier is standing behind the counter talking to someone just out of frame. There's a 'ding' sound, and the voice from above questions the cashier about who the other man is -- he's there to give the cashier a ride at the end of his shift -- then orders the man to stand on the other side of the counter.

The videos are just a few examples that Washington-based Live Eye Surveillance uses to demonstrate its flagship product: a surveillance camera system that keeps constant watch over shops and lets a remote human operator intervene whenever they see something they deem suspicious. For enough money -- $399 per month according to one sales email Motherboard viewed -- a person in Karnal, India will watch the video feed from your business 24/7. The monitors "act as a virtual supervisor for the sites, in terms of assuring the safety of the employees located overseas and requesting them to complete assigned tasks," according to a job posting on the company's website. [...] On its website, the company claims several major corporations as customers, including 7-Eleven, Shell, Dairy Queen, and Holiday Inn. Many of those businesses are franchised, and it isn't clear from Live Eye's materials whether the corporations have purchased the surveillance systems or if they've been bought by individual franchise owners.
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A CCTV Company Is Paying Remote Workers In India To Yell At Armed Robbers More

A CCTV Company Is Paying Remote Workers In India To Yell At Armed Robbers

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  • outsourced the can't do anything mall cop? (Score:3)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Tuesday June 22, 2021 @08:22PM (#61511626)

    outsourced the can't do anything mall cop?

    • No, they've outsourced management.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Not PC and probably considered racist comment below...

      I've had, er, outsourced/offshored people call me on the phone - I think I'm reasonably intelligent and reasonable, I've travelled a bit, and I'm by no means a xenophobe. But fuck me, I can't understand them when they've got the thicker accents (anecdotally, the cheaper the outsource, the thicker the accents). So I could be in such a store, help myself to all kinds off the shelves, stick a gun in the cashier's face and just hear "babble babble Sir babble

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      In the UK the cops won't come unless you have CCTV and call them yourself, having seen the criminals on the screen. They ignore alarms because of too many false ones.

      So you can pay a company to monitor your CCTV and call the cops for you. It would actually be quite good if they could shout at the criminals, tell them that they have called the police. Not just a recording, criminals aren't that easily scared, but a live human who can demonstrate that they have eyes on them, maybe even trick them into looking

  • "Your mother looks like Shiva's armpits!"

  • an remote boss is not going to motivate minwage staff.

    Hell beavis and butt head did not get fired and they had an real boss in the store at time.

  • Forget yelling at them. (Score:3)

    by Revek ( 133289 ) on Tuesday June 22, 2021 @08:31PM (#61511642)
    Get personal, talk about their mom and the erectile dysfunction.

  • thank you steal again!

    • thank you steal again!

      Absolutely. While I'm quite sure the cost of a cup of coffee and a bag of Uncle chips doesn't justify the Indian surveillance cost of >US$100 a week, the fact that the employees know they're being surveilled must roo-oot out a lot of employee theft and booger-picking.

      It's plausibly worth the cost to simply limit booger mining (What does the employee do with the fruit of his exploits, anyway?).

      The point is, after all this coagulated snot nonsense, 3rd World nations can now afford to pay workers to scan y

      • $399 a month means they're paying less than 55 cents per hour to the person doing the watching. And/or loading one watcher with multiple clients.

        • It's the politics of scale, right? The ingrained need to colonize less developed cultures has overshadowed the advantage inherent in exploiting their value as inexpensive labor,

          After all, once you colonize, abdicate as a protectorate, or nominate as a territory of an empire; well, those people expect something of you, don't they?

        • By my maths, 399/month is about 100/week. Assuming a 40 hour work week, that's 2.50/hour, not .55/hour. Still pretty abysmal.

      • Typically what follows mining is making a mint playing the boogercoin market, I'm guessing.

        • Typically what follows mining is making a mint playing the boogercoin market, I'm guessing.

          It would equally not precisely surprise me as much as the average Redditor stonk subscriber to learn that boogercoin is not worth holding with diamond hands.

          The legend of

          Diamond Hands [twitter.com] is akin to that of the pursuit of another mythological monster... Chupacabra, fairly convincing evidence that all nations have a Bigfoot fable that will just not die, despite science, and exculpatory evidence to the contrary.

  • Remote Dye spray and pepper spray. With optional upgrade to 50cal street sweeper

    • Do you mean curry spray?

      • Do you mean curry spray?

        Maybe throw together pepper spray, curry spray, CS gas, some UV dye (so the target is a real hit in the rave scene), and maybe something that smells like a totally rank fart.

  • Grampa Simpson must be happy
    https://i.imgflip.com/wslr8.jp... [imgflip.com]

  • Oye, do the needful and leave! First. do one thing. what is your good name?

  • A remote nagging wife, a remote nagging school/bus matron....

    In the States, juvies would curse and mock the remote overlord before tagging up the camera.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Mspangler ( 770054 )

      "A remote nagging wife,"

      "You see, gentlemen, behind every great man there is a woman urging him on. And so it was with my Stella. She urged me on into outer space. Not that she meant to, but with her continual, eternal, confounded nagging. Well, I think of her constantly, and every time I do, I go further out into space."

      • "A remote nagging wife,"

        "You see, gentlemen, behind every great man there is a woman urging him on. And so it was with my Stella. She urged me on into outer space. Not that she meant to, but with her continual, eternal, confounded nagging. Well, I think of her constantly, and every time I do, I go further out into space."

        "Harcourt Fenton Mudd! What have you been up to?!"

  • Absolutely. I'm thinking a combination pepper ball and CS dispenser hooked up to a remote control turret. Dude in India screams, "DON'T COPY THAT FLOPPY!" and then lets her rip. Hilarity ensures.

  • Nothing odd when one can order food from a remote cashier. [restaurant...online.com]

  • "Thank you for coming! See you in hell!"

  • Who the fuck thinks of these things and actually believes it's normal or reasonable?
    How can anybody put up with having someone literally looking over their shoulder all day every day like that?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      Surveillance of cashiers is something that was done for many decades at this point. It's one of the best thing to have ever happened to consumers, because it drastically lowered the costs of having a store.

      Seriously, next time you're at any reasonable store at the cash register, look up. You'll find a camera.

      • Those cameras don't talk back. They also don't nag at you. There is a difference between this and just 'security cameras' that record.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          Do you really, even for a moment think that people behind those cameras don't talk to manager who in turn talk to cashiers?

          Stop for a second with reflexive "how dare they" outrage and engage the analytical parts of your brain. Feedback on behaviour based on security footage has been a thing in retail world for at least three decades. Likely twice that.

          • Do you really, even for a moment, believe that every bodega on the planet, all of which have security cameras, is paying someone to sit on their ass and watch live feeds from it? LOL, no, they're connected to a DVR and for the most part no one gives a shit about those recordings unless there's a robbery or some other incident. Only the most anal-retentive asshole bosses are going to sit there and watch all those recordings looking for something to criticize their minimum-wage employees about, even they have

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

              No, smaller shops will have owners do it, because they can't afford it. They often can't even afford sales clerks, and it's the owner doing the work behind the counter. Larger stores will have hired people to do it, just like they pretty much always have hired people behind the counter. That's nothing new, small business often can't afford extra staff to do things, because their revenue isn't big enough. It's why they're robbed more too, because they often can't afford the kind of security that bigger shops

              • You want 'analytical'? Try this: demonstrating that you don't trust someone, at all, ever, has malevolent effects on their morale, and in a workplace setting, negatively affects their productivity. Can even affect them physically, as they're under constant stress knowing they're being watched like they're criminals. A better policy is to actually TRUST your employees -- and if you feel you can't trust someone, then you don't have them work for you anymore. Simple as that.
                All this 'surveillance' bullshit ju

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

                  >demonstrating that you don't trust someone, at all, ever, has malevolent effects on their morale, and in a workplace setting, negatively affects their productivity.

                  Math on this has been long since done. Whatever losses impact loss prevention actions that have been the norm for many decades at this point have on morale and productivity carry is far less than losses from direct theft. By a huge margin. We're talking different orders of magnitude. Logic is exceedingly simple, and can be understood by anyon

                  • I think you can eat shit and die, and I'd punch you in the nose if you spoke to me like that in person. Fuck off.

                    • Re: (Score:2)

                      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

                      Considering how I had to grow up, I think that unless you have a lot of experience in street fighting, you would come to regret your decision to invoke violence as a solution in a verbal argument in a very short order.

                      And the way you talk doesn't strike me as someone who has that level of understanding of how violence between men works any more so than you understand the subject we were talking about until you decided to discard the rest of your intelligence and degenerate into a fully emotion-driven state.

      • The people that are already employed have a much easier time to "game the system" than outsiders.
        I remember that more than 10 years ago in a store they found a thieving system in which the cashier was charging fewer items of the same type than what the customer had taken.
        It's quite easy for a cashier to do this:
        "OK, so I see you have three shop carts full of bottled water - that would be 30 2-liter sixpacks. As per our previous agreement, I'll just charge for 30 bottles, and we'll share the price difference

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DrXym ( 126579 )
        Those devices would ordinarily be passive, to prove wrong doing after the a crime is suspected. Now you could be some woman working in a 7-11 and some creepy man is staring at you all day long, possibly trying to hit on you, possibly doing other things.

  • Meh (Score:5, Funny)

    by aaarrrgggh ( 9205 ) on Tuesday June 22, 2021 @11:24PM (#61511906)

    My home automation system just plays a clip of me saying “Honey, get the shotgun” every time motion is sensed outside near the house. I wonder if we are scarring the cats.

    • The fact that your cats' vocabulary might include "shotgun" raises some concerns.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by ebvwfbw ( 864834 )

      My home automation system just plays a clip of me saying “Honey, get the shotgun” every time motion is sensed outside near the house. I wonder if we are scarring the cats.

      Probably not. The cat thinks it owns the houses in the neighborhood. You're just a care taker.

  • I guess the next step is Mana :D

  • Alldaylongwatching Indianpeople ?

  • Hello (Score:3)

    by nyet ( 19118 ) on Wednesday June 23, 2021 @12:59AM (#61512052) Homepage

    Your vehicle's warranty is about to expire.

  • How to keep the working class in check (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    How to keep the working class in check and make money:

    1) Hire people at starving wages and expect them to care
    2) Hire other people at starving wages to yell at the other people you hired
    3) Profit

    Almost like how politics works these days, keep them fighting each other so they ignore the 0.1% at the top, stealing and controlling your life.

  • So this disinterested underpaid person in India who may have 4 or 8 such stores on screen at any time is really going to give a rats ass about what's going on in any one of them. Aside from not giving a rat's ass, I doubt they'll even even recognize the body language or behavior that suggests a threat until it has already happened. And I doubt they'll intimidate thieves or robbers in a way that the physical presence of a security guard might.

    So their role is to push a button when something has already hap

  • Armed Robbers? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Foundryman ( 306698 ) on Wednesday June 23, 2021 @09:02AM (#61512638)

    The title says they're hired to yell at armed robbers. The summary then proceeds to give two examples, both of which are employees, not armed robbers.

    • Re:Armed Robbers? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by omnichad ( 1198475 ) on Wednesday June 23, 2021 @10:28AM (#61512838) Homepage

      They accidentally showed their hand a little too readily. CCTV doesn't do much to stop external crime in stores. Employees are a little easier to track down.

      • They accidentally showed their hand a little too readily. CCTV doesn't do much to stop external crime in stores. Employees are a little easier to track down.

        No kidding. And being in India they can't even call 911 in case of real crime (armed robbery, etc). I guess, conceivably, they could have the non-emergency phone number for each site's local police department, but that's non-emergency....

    • The title says they're hired to yell at armed robbers. The summary then proceeds to give two examples, both of which are employees, not armed robbers.

      It's famously been said that societies have the morals they can afford. With India, there's a bit of lag time...

  • <DING!> You are spending too much time reading /.!!! GET BACK TO WORK!!!

  • What do you want to bet that the guy in India will have something like 100 live feeds he is trying to monitor simultaneously? What are the odds that they are even paying attention at all let alone focusing on your feed when something bad happens?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by ebvwfbw ( 864834 )

      LOL, The voice for Apu on the Simpsons - Sir, please get on the other side of the counter. Yes, you. Other side. As he walks out - Please come again.

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