Actually, I want to think more about the theory of change here. It's conceivable that a ProPublica article could actually make the situation worse, e.g. by advertising the existence of the helmet to other abusive employers, or causing abusive employers to rework their labor practices in a way that looks better to the press but is actually worse.

If the company that makes the helmet is based in a country with good government, maybe a reasonable regulation would be to score workers on productivity, but place limitations on the scoring somehow. E.g. the helmet stops showing the worker's location when they've spent too much time in the heat. Or the helmet estimates the fraction of the workday that the worker spent offsite, but all workers who spend 20% or less of their time offsite are given a score of 20%, so the employer can't force the worker to spend more than 80% of their time onsite. I don't think productivity scoring has to be dystopian in principle; generally speaking it seems reasonable to pay people according to how productive they are.

You could also argue for regulating the helmet out of existence, but I assume in that case it would just be built somewhere else with lax regulations. So the trick is to put in regulation that creates a humane experience for workers, but not so much that Qatar is incentivized to contract the development of a new, more draconian helmet in a different locale. I don't think this should be too hard, because creating a humane experience for workers should also help productivity to a degree.

There's also a security dimension here -- you don't want abusive employers to be able to circumvent these limitations. So you could make it so the helmet only runs code which has been signed with the company's private key, or have a lot of the functionality server-side.

Another possibility is to have something like ITAR, where you can't export to certain countries.

Perhaps wrong impact in short term, but gains in long term?

How many people do you think worked on the project? If I were the OP, I'd be more worried about getting the Khashoggi treatment for speaking out.

What would that accomplish?

Bringing further scrutiny to similar practices there and elsewhere.

Amp up the sort of disdain that might, for example, prevent international organizations from granting legitimacy to these regimes. Things like FIFA, as a completely random example.

I think it's clear that FIFA gives anti-fucks about slave labor.

Sure, but FIFA cares about money and at least some people care about not giving their money to deeply unethical entities. That’s what it’s meant to accomplish.

You need to ask what it accomplishes to leave it in the dark.

Presumably these sinners: https://www.wakecap.com/

OP i am investigative tech journalist. i would love to talk about this. my dms are open and my signal number is here: https://twitter.com/alibreland @hannon22