Is Remote Working Leading to a Boom in Worker Surveillance? (theguardian.com) 91
A Guardian article begins with the story of how a digital surveillance platform called Sneek ruined the first week on the job for a remote worker named David:
Every minute or so, the program would capture a live photo of David and his workmates via their company laptop webcams. The ever-changing headshots were splayed across the wall of a digital conference waiting room that everyone on the team could see. Clicking on a colleague's face would unilaterally pull them into a video call. If you were lucky enough to catch someone goofing off or picking their nose, you could forward the offending image to a team chat via Sneek's integration with the messaging platform Slack.
According to the Sneek co-founder Del Currie, the software is meant to replicate the office. "We know lots of people will find it an invasion of privacy, we 100% get that, and it's not the solution for those folks," Currie says. "But there's also lots of teams out there who are good friends and want to stay connected when they're working together." For David, though, Sneek was a dealbreaker. He quit after less than three weeks on the job. "I signed up to manage their digital marketing," he tells me, "not to livestream my living room."
Little did he realize that his experience was part of a wide-scale boom in worker surveillance- and one that's poised to become a standard feature of life on the job... One of the major players in the industry, ActivTrak, reports that during March 2020 alone, the firm scaled up from 50 client companies to 800. Over the course of the pandemic, the company has maintained that growth, today boasting 9,000 customers — or, as it claims, more than 250,000 individual users. Time Doctor, Teramind, and Hubstaff — which, together with ActivTrak, make up the bulk of the market — have all seen similar growth from prospective customers.
These software programs give bosses a mix of options for monitoring workers' online activity and assessing their productivity: from screenshotting employees' screens to logging their keystrokes and tracking their browsing.
Speaking to the Guardian, Juan Carloz, a digital researcher and privacy advocate with the University of Melbourne, shares a theory about why remote workers aren't pushing back against surveillance softare.
"Since, rightly or wrongly, [its] being framed as a trade-off for remote work, many are all too content to let it slide."
According to the Sneek co-founder Del Currie, the software is meant to replicate the office. "We know lots of people will find it an invasion of privacy, we 100% get that, and it's not the solution for those folks," Currie says. "But there's also lots of teams out there who are good friends and want to stay connected when they're working together." For David, though, Sneek was a dealbreaker. He quit after less than three weeks on the job. "I signed up to manage their digital marketing," he tells me, "not to livestream my living room."
Little did he realize that his experience was part of a wide-scale boom in worker surveillance- and one that's poised to become a standard feature of life on the job... One of the major players in the industry, ActivTrak, reports that during March 2020 alone, the firm scaled up from 50 client companies to 800. Over the course of the pandemic, the company has maintained that growth, today boasting 9,000 customers — or, as it claims, more than 250,000 individual users. Time Doctor, Teramind, and Hubstaff — which, together with ActivTrak, make up the bulk of the market — have all seen similar growth from prospective customers.
These software programs give bosses a mix of options for monitoring workers' online activity and assessing their productivity: from screenshotting employees' screens to logging their keystrokes and tracking their browsing.
Speaking to the Guardian, Juan Carloz, a digital researcher and privacy advocate with the University of Melbourne, shares a theory about why remote workers aren't pushing back against surveillance softare.
"Since, rightly or wrongly, [its] being framed as a trade-off for remote work, many are all too content to let it slide."
Finger-picking good. (Score:2)
If you were lucky enough to catch someone goofing off or picking their nose, you could forward the offending image to a team chat via Sneek's integration with the messaging platform Slack.
We need to put an end to this. Let there be more booger-pickers.
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If you were lucky enough to catch someone goofing off or picking their nose, you could forward the offending image to a team chat via Sneek's integration with the messaging platform Slack.
We need to put an end to this. Let there be more booger-pickers.
In the words of Marie Antoinette, "Let them eat nose cake."
Good company culture leads to success. Bad culture (Score:5, Interesting)
Any company that approves of this sort of surveillance is clearly displaying an out of control terrible culture. This is probably a few terrible managers who are feeling left out in the cold and exposing how they are not actual contributes to success who are pushing for this sort of BS. The upper management is not displaying any leadership skills by curtailing such out of control behaviour. Even worse if they are the ones encouraging it.
I both hate and love companies like this. I hate them because they are making people miserable. I love them because hiring their best miserable people is super easy. You don't have to offer them more money, a better location, or anything like that. You just tell them. "I will stop punching you in the face every day." and you have a winning offer.
Re:Good company culture leads to success. Bad cult (Score:5, Insightful)
This is middle-management trying to save their own damn jobs
Re:Good company culture leads to success. Bad cult (Score:5, Insightful)
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Indeed. Much like how we discovered how we discovered digital advertising was absolutely useless during this pandemic.
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Bingo.
This is what I think should happen, it hits the middle ground:
1. employees employ a virtual avatar, and all it does is switch between "sleeping", "away", "typing", "in front of screen", "looking away from screen", and "idle". This can be controlled either by looking at the keyboard/mouse interrupt rate, not the keys being pressed for privacy reasons.
Or you know, employ a vtuber avatar and accomplish the same.
Basically it's something for the employer and co-workers to use as a virtual "I'm at the desk"
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There is no such thing as "company culture" or "company values". Companies are being established to make money for the share holders, nothing more and nothing less. There are corporate policies which may or may not be conducive to business. Anthropomorphism has gone too far when it comes to corporations. Companies are not bound by morality, companies don't have a culture. The only thing that companies are supposed to do is to make money.
Merriam-Webster:
b: the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization
a corporate culture focused on the bottom line
Re:Good company culture leads to success. Bad cult (Score:4, Informative)
Anthropomorphism would be talking about culture between companies.
Company culture means the culture between the people within the company. Any group of people interacting over time constitutes a culture. This is just simple fact.
As long as there are people working together, there will be a culture there. Cultures can evolve to become surprisingly different from other groups with similar makeup and/or purpose. Culture is affected by everything from formal policies, the behaviour and attitude of people with formal power, the behaviour and attitude of people with informal influence in the group, and just the general makeup and history of the group and all they take with them. It will often change over time, but has an inherent inertia or even state: the same group with the same formal rules but a different "start" could function quite differently.
Many, many people have experienced the culture being wildly different at different companies, and seen that it affects not just the quality of life for employees but also the performance the company. Many people have changed companies because of the culture. Many people have left a job they used to like because the culture changed. Try telling them all it doesn't exist.
You could get lucky and get a fine internal culture by chance, but companies that ignore the effects of culture and their power to shape it do so at their peril.
The only thing that companies are supposed to do is to make money.
Supposed by whom? God? The government? The owners? Shouldn't that be up to them, not you?
Meaning and purpouse do not exist in the external universe. They are artifacts of the mind. Consequentially, they are make little sense without specifying whose mind we are talking about. Which one you pick changes everything.
When I take up a position with a company, MY purpouse with the company is what matters to ME.
Re:Good company culture leads to success. Bad cult (Score:4, Interesting)
If only it was so black and white that "good company culture" and "make money" are orthogonal to each other and one has no relation to the other. I suppose that's what MBA class teaches nowadays - that people are simple mindless automatons that can be plugged in and out like a lightbulb.
Employment is a give and take - employees give time to make money. Employees will put in as much work as they feel they are wroth. A healthy corporate culture where managers enable their underlings to get work done and help solve problems, is generally a more profitable workplace because people who feel valued actually do work harder.
Likewise, people who have to be whipped into working either are deadweight and you have to keep whipping them for work to get done because they have nowhere else to go, or are looking for elsewhere to go. Either way, they're not putting full effort into the work and just doing the minimum necessary.
On the flip side, people talk. If you have a job opening and you're known as a company that exploits people, you won't attract the best talent - the best talent know they can do better, and they look for other opportunities. You'd just get the desperate talent, the ones who are doing it just to get a paycheque.
The science is there. Making money isn't easy and humans are one of the worst things about running a company because they're complex machines that cannot be simply treated as "money in, work out".
The real problem is a "good corporate culture" is a very vague thing to do. It's not "fancy meal options" or "play rooms" or "ping pong table" and it almost certainly can't be bought with money. It encompasses a whole range of things from pay and benefits to working conditions and supports and many other parts.
It's also about how do you accommodate different people. Some people feel work is "money in, work out" and that's it. Others may wish for more support or community - perhaps someone is having a birthday and they'd like a few people over to celebrate. It takes a good manager to be able to handle both properly.
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If it ws me ... (Score:3)
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Dilbert... https://dilbert.com/strip/2020... [dilbert.com]
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This.
You want me to turn my camera on without warning me first, be prepared to see more than all the bleach in the world can cure.
Trust (Score:4, Insightful)
Simple as that.
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If only every CEO had this in their fortune cookie, the one they actually open
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The average CEO is a lot like a fortune cookie.
Well, a mix of a fortune cookie and a magic-8-ball, to be precise.
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Worked well for our military [youtu.be] as long as one's OK with lots of firings.
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Trust is a two way street. Pre Covid, I worked for a very large computer company. Many people abused "working from home". I'd get calls from people "working from home" asking me to essentially do their job because it was their "working from home day". I worked and they worked in electronic hardware. They needed to get their lazy asses in to work if there was something that they needed to do for their job. Instead, they either put it off or tried to get someone else to do their job for them.
Some times,
Block the camera (Score:3)
My work laptop has a physical shutter on the camera. It stays closed.
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Mine is connected to an external monitor so the lid is always down anyway. Having it up would block the attached screen making it harder to work.
[John]
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Do it.
It should be easy in the current economy to find a security consultant with 20 years of experience, 5 of them with containers and cloud security, and 5 years of experience as a financial auditor and a background in law in this economy after all, right?
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I did recently change jobs and wasn't even held to the 3 month notice period because they didn't want someone around who didn't give a shit anymore and just wanted to start their new job so I agreed a 1 month notice period with them upon handing in my notice
I think that's pretty standard. I did six weeks of my last 3 month notice period, but that was negotiated and I was leaving on good terms. The one before I did 4 out of 12 weeks; you hand over your resignation letter and immediately cover the handover tasks needed and timescales needed.
It probably helps that the sort of people that become software engineers are also the sort to finish what they're doing, so they tend to hand in their notice as a project is completing or wrapping up, and the company would ra
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Do it.
It should be easy in the current economy to find a security consultant with 20 years of experience, 5 of them with containers and cloud security, and 5 years of experience as a financial auditor and a background in law in this economy after all, right?
If my experience has taught me anything it’s that the vast majority of managers don’t actually care if their employees are capable. Add to this almost none take security seriously at all so if you quit or are fired they will just slap the wine bottle outta the guys hand on the street outside and hand them your job.
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This works until you're facing what our legislator did a couple years ago, i.e. that the C-Level is now personally, read, with his own, private money, liable for damages if it can be shown that he was negligent.
That means they're VERY willing to spend corporate money to cover their private ass.
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I think better than shutters, someone needs to sell a "blurry lens" attachment you can put over your camera that degrades the image quality. A tiny amount of vasoline or something might work.
Something that puts the laptop in the grey area of "has camera problem" but "not really worth the headache to replace with a known working laptop".
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If you don't want to mess with the camera, just wrap yourself in saran wrap and speak through a piece of greaseproof paper.
Ultimatum gigs (Score:2)
choose WFH gigs or office work and commuting. OH and WFH comes with camera audits that you are at your desk working when you say you are
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Wrong, it's an invasion of privacy. When we had offices and then cubes at work .. this wouldn't have flown and folks had to get up to see if you were in your space .. even in open workspaces folks can get up with their laptop and work anywhere in the building or go to the pub around the corner ...etc. This always monitored shit is just that ... shit. It's managers taking micro-management to the nTH degree. I wouldn't work for a company that employees this garbageware. Period.
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Sorry, not taking your job offer.
NEXT!
Work PC vs Home PC (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh they do keep an eye on us, that I've known for years, even before the Pandemic.
I work for one of the largest corporates, and they don't really inform us about it but since I work in IT I did discover that we have monitoring software on our work computers, one of those is one that searches the harddisk for images and lewd words and will report those back to management.
But I'm actually okay with that, especially since the company bought and paid for the hardware.
I don't use my work laptop for any private purposes, sure - we do chit chat with our colleagues just like we would do in office, but we word ourselves a bit more carefully than the jokes we crack in the lounge, or by the coffee machines. I don't have ANY need to use my laptop for anything else than work related issues.
Ever since day one, I have covered the web cam with a sticker, same with the microphone arrays, and even the fingerprint scanner with black tape, a lot of my colleagues have done the same, not because we're worried about that corporate will listen in on us, but because webcam hacking is a real thing and something even corporate can't protect themselves against fully, our corporate know we all do this, and have zero comments on that so far.
I even go as far as to remove my laptop after work, putting it back into my computer bag, and placing the bag far away from the living room. I do the same with my smartphone, when I don't use it, I got to a far away area in my house, just enough to hear the ringing sound, but so far away it won't capture anything. This is not really to avoid corporate from listening in, but moreover to avoid hackers from listening to my keyboard as I type, and to keep my banking private etc.
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I worked in security, FPU. Since 2005 employers were catching people using their PC to watch horse racing, or running a side business.
Slashdot covered that. [slashdot.org]
I can see why a forum full of "trust us" doesn't fly like it use to.
Re:Work PC vs Home PC (Score:4, Interesting)
You ain't wrong.
Your advice to fake it - is what should be applied to your online presence as well, so I will extend your advice a little:
- Google the clean stuff on your computer.
- Fake positivity.
- Use tor and tails when you want to google the real questions. And never use anything that can relate to you, like typos, passwords, forums, accounts etc.
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I turn the company-owned laptop off. The lid is shut. The external keyboard I use during the day is unplugged and sitting on top of the laptop, my wireless mouse sitting on top of the keyboar
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I could access a VDI from any of my devices but it's clunky and annoying. Most of our systems are cloud based anyway so why connect to point A just to bounce through to points B and C?
The work issued laptop is full of shite but that also means it's entirely integrated into the corporate ecosystem. That means native support for all the productivity tools I use with no fuss or nonsense, and I don't have to infest my own PC.
I could do almost all my job without leaving the Microsoft website (which is a bit depr
They "get that"?! (Score:2)
"We know lots of people will find it an invasion of privacy, we 100% get that, and it's not the solution for those folks,"
Obviously, they don't get it at all.
"But there's also lots of teams out there who are good friends and want to stay connected when they're working together"
In forty years, I have never seen any group as sick what is described by the previous statement
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I don't want to see the people in my team 40+ hours a week. It's bad enough to see them for our Friday company BBQ.
I want to work with these people, not have some sort of personal relationship with them.
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It's obviously an excuse. If the goal is to give an option to those who want to stay connected, there is no reason to mandate the webcam.
If the webcam is mandatory, such mandate is obviously not aimed at those who would want to use it willingly, but at those who would not and need to be forced to do so.
Wait until (Score:3)
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I always wondered who goatse.cx really was. You owe me a lot of therapy bills.
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cam address or GTFO
Not imaginative enough (Score:4, Informative)
The thing with automated systems like this one vs real human interactions is you can game them. In this case, I would record myself being all serious and on the job for a whole day, say, then point the webcam to a TV screen and replay it. Then you can go play Super Mario or something. If your colleagues complain that you don't react when they pull you in a meeting, you can always blame it on the Sneek software.
If you don't want the surveillance, abuse the surveillance tech. It's much easier to do than when actual people watch you, because those automated systems all work on the premise that people are honest and play by the book.
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At one place I worked decades ago, they had a CCTV cam installed directly over my work area. At 7AM every day, I would vigorously scratch my ass. Eye's rolled back, mouth slightly open, slightly moaning and drooling. After 3 months they took the cam down. Work got done either way.
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the guy in 7G just turns the cam the way and sleeps in there.
Productivity Theater (Score:2)
Why don't managers spend the time reviewing our actual work and answering work-related questions and concerns we have? That would be far more useful than counting coffee breaks. Poor communication is probably the biggest source of waste I see.
If the job is so simple that measuring keystrokes tells you anything useful, then it should be fucking automated.
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Agree. I take early morning walks and record ideas while out walking. Plus it’s good to get out of the house.
[John]
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Quickly scanning your comment made me stop and read it properly.
I do my best thinking in a hot shower [...] pumping blood thru the brain while browsing the scenery.
Where do you shower?!
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My best ERD's come while taking a shit.
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Then they would have to work, that's not in their interest. They want to make you work, preferably with as little effort on their side as they can get away with.
The main reason they think you'd want to slack off is that this is what they do. There's a saying in German, the knave thinks (others are) as he is. Never been truer than in the case of PHBs.
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I did some work for a large collection agency a few year ago. It was a totally dystopian atmosphere with a ton of employee monitoring, a culture focused on punishment/discipline for transgressions, whether they were doing the wrong thing or not enough of the right thing.
I think some portion of this management philosophy was driven by security and employee exposure to financial information, although what little exposure I actually had to their day-day work it wasn't like you saw financial dossiers, mostly n
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they hire cheap, and in bulk, knowing they are getting a lot of losers
Most contact centres I've worked alongside hire cheap, and in bulk, and do proper training.
The losers get pruned fast, the capable ones get retained and the good ones get promoted into other business roles.
Cheap can mean 'straight out of university', so why drop your standards?
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No wonder they have you working from home
One Cannot Surveil Paper. (Score:2)
I use a Franklin planner and an engineering notebook. I still have a whiteboard and post-its as well. I my camera is on and shuttered, they get a good look at the whiteboards. I do all my note taking and a lot of planning and even some maths on paper. While I still use the PC for data collection, simulation, E-mail, ticketing, Jira, etc, I am a great deal more organized, and prepared for the daily meeting onslaught. The bonus is writing work down is getting the work done, and cannot be converted into a met
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Indeed.
My WFH setup (Score:3)
If you are working from home the first assumption you must make is that the employer laptop is being monitored. Maybe not every single keystroke but all the websites you visit will be tracked. So in my home office I have two computers - the one my employer gave me and my personal computer.
The one my employer gave me is only used for work - nothing else. I don't check personal email on it. I don't do any banking or bill pay. I don't use it to visit any news sites or Slashdot or YouTube or any other website I might frequent. On my personal machine I don't store any work related files or documents.
Some people might think this is a bit extreme to go to such lengths but I do it because I know that there is some nameless, faceless drone in HR or InfoSec that gets paid to sit there and watch for this stuff. Their job is to protect the company, not you, and if they catch you surfing a porn site they will get you fired. They are standing on firm legal ground, since it is their laptop and you signed agreements that you would not engage in such activities. So by strictly segregating personal activities from work activities I feel that I'm safe.
The next thing I did was get one of those little sliding things that cover your webcam. The only time it is ever open is when I'm on a Zoom call. When the call is over I cover the camera. When I sign out for the day I cover the camera. I do this because I know that it is possible to remotely activate webcams without the little light coming on. The HR drone is going to have to get their kicks somewhere else.
At the end of the day I shut down the employer laptop. Most likely I don't have anything to worry about but it gives me closure and peace of mind so I do it.
The software mentioned in this article is creepy to say the least. I'm pretty sure my employer doesn't use anything like that but if I found out they did I would have serious concerns and probably question my desire to work for them. If you don't trust me don't hire me.
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I do the same thing. My work computer basically has nothing but work stuff on it. Very occasionally I'll come to sites like /. or Ars, but they're always very inoffensive sites and I don't spend a great deal of time on them. Usually it's just when I am stuck in a boring meeting and need to be able to hit the unmute button in case someone asks me a question. No personal email (who needs to when you have a phone) or anything like that. At the end of the day I put the system into sleep mode and close the lid.
I
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Take your security 1 step farther.
Isolate that work laptop from your home network in some way shape or form; that way they can't snoop your personal network.
I also advocate avoiding Wi-Fi usage at home. Only used wired networking for your home network. Ok, if you rent a place that could be impossible, but if you own your place (and I don't mean "condo own"), then install the cabling and a proper firewall (not one of those tosser junk boxes you can get for pennies. A wire inside your own house and walls is a
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My work laptop has its own internet connection. It pretty much has to, corporate requirement.
Hey, as long as they pay for it, they can have it...
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I like the idea of separating both computers on the home network. Currently both of them are hard wired and both use a VPN. Different brands of VPN. I disable wireless on both machines. So i haven't figured out how to separate them at the router level yet but having the two VPN tunnels effectively accomplishes the same thing - I think. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
If your company (Score:2)
Cant quantify the quanity/quality of work you do through a manager with performance reviews or other things, then I would be more worried about the company as a whole, not the employees. If employees are producing the expected work output and accomplishing goals, then there isn't a need to babysit them.
Crimeseek (Score:2)
This is an extention and overt example of "crimeseek" that has infected American society, through high/low/no tech methods. Everyone has been monstered into thinking that everyone else is out to get them, to look for even the faintest signs that something is 'amiss'. This was helped along greatly with "see something, say something" and an endless barrage of mass news media scare stories and crime dramas. We have created a damaged populace all too ready to point at someone and scream "WITCH!", though this is
All day live stream (Score:1)
I thought this was quite extreme, but according to my boss it was normal at their previous office. I could smell the BS and clearly I was not trusted to work without being watched.
Luckily it was never implemented. I would have refused anyway. I don't want my office to see my home life.
The ridiculous thing is... I get more work done at home because there are less dis
Always there... (Score:1)
Illegal (Score:1)
Fark that (Score:1)
I mostly work on my home computer anyway (we have web interfaces for everything, why not?)
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Avoiding normal wear and tear. Does your employer let you come in and shower? Same principle.
18th century (Score:2)
One has to wonder, what sort of piece of crap company would think that a digital version of the 18th century's ideal for a prison [wikipedia.org] makes a good working environment?
pants (Score:2)
Still trying to see if Jessica in Marketing is wearing pants when she is home? Really? That girl is wound so tight its a wonder that she can pee. There are things you cannot unsee.
Everyone knows that Dave in IT will be caught searching for goatse. He'll claim it was on slashdot on his own time.