Of course, that has turned the entire thing into the most annoying game you can imagine. Add in the "beatings will continue until morale improves" meetings on the reports, and I'm now convinced one of the best questions I can ask of a new employer is "how do you track employee morale?".
Someday, I'll get asked why that is, and I'll get a chance to quote Seymour Cray's "I think that you just answered your own question."
Instead of having these quarterly "how is working here?" surveys that no one likes, you could input a bunch of questions and it would "randomly" (probably not randomly, but arbitrarily) message them to members of your organizations, and anonymise the results.
That meant that instead of having some huge process every quarter where everyone just kind of skips through the whole thing, if they even read it at all, you could get a semi-live feel for how things are going day to day or week to week, and even get relatively-realtime indications about what effect company events were having on employees.
You can easily get into cynical territory, where you know that an impromptu office ice cream and macaron party will bump up morale by 30%, while laying off an entire team will generally drop it by 20%, so obviously you should lay people off on the Thursday and then have an ice cream and macaron party on the Friday, but overall it's a good idea to get a continual sense of the feeling of your teams and what might be troubling or exciting them.
It emails people with some frequency between weekly and monthly, and it only asks you a few questions every time. Mostly it's a 1-10 scale thing, with cute little graphics.
It also asks open ended questions where you're told the answers are anonymous. That's all well and good, but if your manager can't figure out who's who from the tone of the message, they're a new manager.
And sure, it sounds like a great idea to spot issues. The instant two managers compare scores, or worse, are compelled to compare scores, all bets are off on it's usefulness. Then when you have a meeting where a high level manager painfully asks for input on how to make things better from the entire team while going over each chart in painful detail, the clear goal every individual contributor has is to just pick 8 or 9 and make the stupid meetings stop.
We were assured the results were only to be used in aggregate and no response would be possible to trace back to the individual who'd made it.
I almost fell off my chair laughing when the report had been compiled - the responses were anonymized. Of sorts. Responses used in aggregate. Of sorts.
The engineer, female, age bracket 40-49 years, $SITE in the office next door wasn't as amused.
As the sample size was one, her every response had been printed in the report.
Oops.
So often a direct manager can't see open ended text in their context but their skip level manager could.
They shouldn't have ever reported on a sample size of 1. That's a bad system
If you're working remotely this could easily identify you.
I should start responding to the survey behind a different VPN endpoint each time. See if anyone asks questions.
Feel your pain
If you have to ask..
Their jobs got outsourced, the police kills without penalty (especially blacks but any race will do), the lobbies run amok, their wages have been stagnant since the late 70s, their employers get increasingly more power over them, health, housing, and college have skyrocketed in costs, ...
... given all the above, which range from quality of life to life and death matters, and which not much protest has been done, surveillance is close to the bottom of the priority list...
> surveillance is close to the bottom of the priority list...
These are directly related. Surveillance causes chilling effects.
Witness it in the people who hate Trump or Clinton or Biden or anyone else that is put forward: you can divide an entire country on it right down the middle, and meanwhile their policies in reality (not policy positions! implementations!) are basically indistinguishable. The same thing would happen regardless of who is elected, for the most part, because the election is a show, a pressure release valve to make people think they've done something.
Even now we have people who think that electing Biden will help solve the problems you've pointed out. People ostensibly on the Left are mad about four years of rhetoric that has been riling them up, and have pulled the lever for "change" to resolve this. And yes, you will _hear_ less about blacks being shot by police for four years - that's part of the strategy, which the media cooperates / coordinates with. The actual number of incidents may not change... Instead, it will be time for news stories and events which angry up the Right for a few years, again forcing them to direct their resources and energy at fighting some spectre that won't change anything instead of directing their efforts inward to truly root out corruption and decay.
There is no protest. Protests are just the establishment throwing a different sort of parade, celebrating their power by demonstrating what they can allow to happen without facing any consequences themselves. Go ahead, yell in the street, burn down a city - nothing changes because nobody is listening and your actions ultimately only hurt people lower down the chain.
Surveillance did not stop the summer of Antifa and BLM rioting. It will not stop a summer of redneck riots if that's in the cards either. Surveillance probably does stop people who actually stand some chance of causing real change; but if that is a functional, working thing, you won't hear a word about it.
(A quick google shows me that Steingold is famous for bagels, and nobody hates bagels)
Don't escort the big chariot; You will only make yourself dusty. Don't think about the sorrows of the world; You will only think yourself wretched.
Don't escort the big chariot; You won't be able to see for dust. Don't think about the sorrows of the world; Or you will never escape from your despair.
Don't escort the big chariot; You'll be stifled with dust. Don't think about the sorrows of the world; You will only load yourself with care.
This also correlates to the idea of boiling frogs. Apparently, if you turn up the heat slowly the frog will stay in the warm water and be boiled, as opposed to jumping out, which is what happens if you place the frog directly into warm water.
Overall, results seem inconclusive. I don't see that Hutchinson's result (frog becomes increasingly active as water is heated by 1°C per minute) contradicts Heinzmann's (no movement as water is heated by 0.2°C per minute).
Goltz's finding that "a frog that has had its brain removed will remain in slowly heated water" seems... unsurprising.
It's all based on three words: 'already', 'will', and 'we'. 'We are already being tracked by our smartphones - So we will be wearing implanted radio chips soon".
Reject 'we' by not using one and you're not being 'aready' tracked, and hence 'will' not accept whatever coming after this.
But it requires some bravery, which is known to be eradicated in people these days.
It really should be a bad term - of course very powerful people conspire to ensure that they get the best they can. And that would mean writing legislation, defining what education is, etc, etc. Its all very obvious...
I think we're doing the same, in a sense asking privately "bring it on; let's see what this would do... to _them_ " as if we're watching a tornado from the safety of the TV not caring of the results; and like that navy officer not able to defend the ship, locked in awe (or ignorance?) of our own peril.
How long does simple key logging last before they add eye tracking?
Elevator pitch for VCs would be about machine learning - neural networks generating consumer head nodding behaviors that match the read phrases, as well as rising simulated body temperature in righteous awe or anger upon "reading" certain pieces of spam. And how all that behavioral data is somehow valuable (lol).
You can have virtual cubicles full of imaginary AI-generated people automating bureaucratic busywork being generated by AI management algorithms.
Maybe I should write a novel about this. (Or am I too late?)
I figure it's an arms race that will play out in the software space. More generally, it's deep-fakes vs deep-fake-detectors.
Had the joy to see some contractors at work. The webcam is recording 24/7 to ensure their face is in front of the screen.
If the employee looks away for a second, the screen flashes something about no user being present.
If somebody else shows up in the field of view, for example me walking by, the screen flashes something about an unauthorized user.
The session is locked out after a few notifications.
They're trash.
This is what it looks like for students: use your laptop webcam to scan the room with your webcam, remove anything deemed suspicious; provide proof of identity (student id), wait for the software to register your face, name, and identity; test opens take test, do not look down or it locks, do not look away or it locks, do not refer to your notes or it locks, do not have people walk behind you or it locks, do not have pets walk behind you or it locks, do not have posters of movies behind you or it registers as a person and locks, do not accidentally click another tab or window or it locks, do not use any of the built-in windows accessibility tools or certain 3rd party accessibility tools (dragon software) or it locks, do not use a mac or it locks; fail test.
Single parents, individuals living with many people in the home, and anyone who does not have access to an isolated quiet, alone work space is screwed.
And it's completely asinine. Just ridiculous.
You have to onboard user accounts to them, install the authentication software on a laptop, and it will open a remote desktop to an AWS workspace. The session is constantly tracking the user's face and gets terminated if they look away for a minute.
Contractors are disconnected regularly because their face stopped being recognized, or they can't login in the first place after 5 tries.
Recall one contractor that contacted support because they couldn't login, support told him that their face was too dark.
The hell did I just read?! Can't tell if this is satire or real at his point but anyway let me just beat your employee tracking system by propping up a photo of my face in front of the webcam.
Wait, is your fancy system looking for features of life like facial twitches and eye movement to not be fooled by a photo?
Fine, here's a deepfaked avatar of my face acting alive powered by nvidia's latest deep learning magic.
See where this is going?
Was sent a link for an online test (hackerrank if I remember right) for which I needed to keep my camera ON.
Unless this is some kind of top-secret government consultancy thing that is totally unappropriate.
It's minimum wage, hourly contracting with no benefits.
Since all you really need to get started is a laptop, there are rather millions of more or less atomized software shops and developers attached to other industries, other streams of revenue and capital, other entirely disconnected cultures and social norms.
What really scares me is the number of people that adopt this strange Panglossian view dismissing every abuse of power as a one-off that cannot possibly reveal widespread systemic failures.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel...
And no - CCTV is not widespread at all. There's far more CCTV in the UK than there is in the EU where I live now.
States do indeed issue local IDs. There is no common EU ID card and no common EU passport.
There isn't even a common immigration database for Schengen - although that's planned for 2023. (It was supposed to be 2022, but it's been delayed by a year.)
When you send around slides or a doc, there are times when it's actually pretty useful to see who took a look or not -- so if it's important you can ping them. It's not perfect, but it helps.
Privacy-wise it's not a whole lot different from being able to see who's currently viewing the document, which has existed forever.
Y.T.'s mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00 P.M., she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading this memo...
Y.T.'s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes reading the memo. It's better for younger workers to spend too long, to show that they're careful, not cocky. It's better for older workers to go a little fast, to show good management potential. She's pushing forty. She scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It's a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary.