Development of a feature like this surely started during the WFH craze, where managers could no longer casually walk behind people who had to have their monitors facing outwards. A market opened up, and this is not the only tool for this sort of corporate surveillance.
Certain Software Engineers will probably get some time without it by claiming they need Admin rights and that the system messes up their graphics or slows down their system or what have you.
See:
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/r/ro...
Hint: They weren’t trusting. Corporate surveillance follows technology. The bosses are obsessed with watching their workers every second. This is nothing new. What’s new is that we now do most of our work on networked computers, cameras are vanishingly cheap, and data storage is abundant.
HN is sliding downhill.
Perhaps feeling the heat of other viable political parties joining the table will light a fire under the asses of the legacy political parties?
What are some possible venues for proposing such legislation locally - and what are some examples of success?
In any case, something like this wouldn't be hard to implement on Linux. And if Windows normalizes it in corporate environments, rest assured that other parties will offer it for Linux as well.
Eventually we'll have programmers with Recall activated by company policy on their PCs, actively training the AI models that will replace their labor.
That has to be part of the goal here. The full automation of software development. Think about how much money Microsoft would make if they did it, and how much they would save if they implemented it.
We need a new Luddite movement to protect the workers from all of this.
I work in a massive data center. Manned by very few people. I often think about how many homes could be heated or cooled with the power used to prop up the internet.
It feels borderline criminal when there are homeless and hungry all over the world.
I actually want this feature. My memory is awful and I am constantly going to Chrome's History function.
This feature isn't bad, I just want it encrypted locally with no telemetry, which sadly I realize most tech companies love spamming their products these days.
In my times at the MS mothership I never met any managers or developers that were malicious or had bad intent. Sometimes they were overly profit-motivated, but the conversations were always "How much can we price this feature at?" not "How can I make a really evil feature that I can sell?"
Union busting & screen tracking already works pretty well as is for the goals you’ve outline.
We usually think about tracking/measurement as Big Brother looking over our shoulder, but all of us are living a day-to-day reality of losing context and having to invest a lot of effort and time to get it back (usually only partially).
I don't think I understand your point here. It feels as if you're framing this as a binary decision/outcome. Personally I see Relay making such abuse easier. So I don't think the existence of bad acts in any way lessens the potential harm of Relay.
> We usually think about tracking/measurement as Big Brother looking over our shoulder, but all of us are living a day-to-day reality of losing context and having to invest a lot of effort and time to get it back (usually only partially).
I also don't understand this. Do you keep notes? If the problem is quite large for you, I think you should take more notes and likely better notes (a skill in of itself). Yes, this has cost, but so does everything. There is no free lunch. But notes are distilled while technologies like Relay are dragnets. And at the root of your argument is the recognition that information is powerful. So you have to ask what information has power and to who. Because information that may not be useful to you may be useful to others who wish to use power against you. And in those scenarios, I don't know about you, but I'd rather have distilled information, and more specifically be more aware of what information is being stored, than just scoop up everything.
Personally, I just don't think it is very hard to take notes.
I'm not quite sure what you mean, I see this as a long term trend that doesn't really have an end point.
There are always people that some manager wants to get rid of, for performance or unrelated reasons.
Employers are scared of getting sued for wrongful termination. Often they do it anyway, but then they need to make up a reason. They're decent at it already, but my prediction is that wrongful termination will become far more widespread and harder to detect or fight in court.
It won't stop though.
E.g. "Employees that might be suffering burnout and need attention"
Which I can see for both PR optics and product reasons. If they retain the secret sauce and raw data, it makes it more difficult for others to go over-the-top and compete.
Do you think Microsoft will prevent their paying customers (the companies) from querying, "What is the strongest legal reason to fire <person> based on the past three years of activity on this computer?"
Their sales team would be absolute fools not to point out how much easier it makes it for a manager to see historically whether someone is performing tasks as they are specified in some formal handbook.
The difference between doing that for reasonable reasons and doing that for post-hoc justification of targeted reprisals is in the mind of the manager and nowhere else. Maybe unspoken, but incredibly obvious.
"Give me the man and I will give you the case against him."
They need data to feed their LLM / AI models. Period.
That's just an actual use case that their true customers would pay for, I think it's awful and should be illegal under any reasonable worker protections but why would they not advertise it this way privately to business customers?
I also don't think it's cynical to think that a manager looking for a reason to get rid of someone will have a much easier time justifying a PIP or just straight up firing someone if they can retroactively have an AI do it for them.
Why wouldn't they be able to ask the system "how much of <employee they don't like>'s time do they spend doing things on the computer that are not directly related to <company name>?"
Is it technically happening already? Sure, there's nasty nasty spyware being forced on people and it is awful and I hate that those employers are getting away with it. But integrated into the OS, on by default, with a long memory? Just imagine how easy it will be to fire anyone that tries to unionize in an effort to fight against such surveillance.