Big tech and governments are monitoring and recording your eating activities. c/Privacy provides tips and tricks to protect your privacy against global surveillance.
Partners:
what's with the tone of that headline?
yeah newsflash, everyone slacks off at work to some degree or other, i wish we would stop having to pretend otherwise. one literally cannot focus on one task for 8 hours straight
Right? If I get my work done on time and put out high quality work and my workload is comparable to others, then that's all the corp needs to know.
If I'm performing poorly, ok, sure investigate. Otherwise fuck off with this babysitter spyware. It's insulting.
This should really be illegal (I think it is in the EU)
Here in the states we're FREE... to be spied upon... by the gatekeepers of our health care.
yes it is!
extremely illegal in fact!
Oh. Like MS Teams that changes my status if I stop moving my mouse for one minute?
I like the idea that this is somehow used as tracking by managers. Everyone in my workplace just agrees it's a bug in Teams and that you can't rely on someone's online status icon to know if they're around.
... handily defeated by placing your mouse on top of a wristwatch.
!? How tf have I never heard or thought of this. Thanks for the massive increase in non-away time you just gave me
There was a series on this. I think the video on a phone worked best.
Or putting something heavy on the left shift key.
Sound plan- I personally run a script that toggles numlock every few minutes.
You can also get a little mouse dongle for a few bucks that plugs into a USB port and tells the computer to wiggle the mouse every few seconds.
Ontario requires employers of a certain size (>= 25, IIRC) to have a written policy on remote employee tracking. This has been a great bit of transparency, and has helped ward employers against actually tracking remote workers. I hope the rest of the country follows suit.
Something that may also end up putting pressure on these paranoid tin-pot dictators, too, is asking during job interviews whether the company monitors keystrokes, and, if they do, why they don't trust their employees to be professionals.
Monitoring keystrokes seems like it's too insecure. Is IT seeing passwords and sensitive work data all day? I mean, even more than normal. That's a better way to get sued.
That second part seems like a great way to ensure you don't get the job. It's basically equivalent to saying "you guys don't drug test, right?"
That second part seems like a great way to ensure you don’t get the job.
If they monitor, sure. And that would ultimately be the point, because you don't want the job in that case anyway.
If everyone's asking, they won't be able to hire anyone, putting pressure on them to change their policies if they ever want to hire anyone.
this is one of the reasons i asked for a linux pc, they told me to install the OS myself... well sure there are no Spyware
There are tools that can monitor usage at the bios level.
But you'd have to install it yourself in a scenario where you manage your company machine yourself.
I'm permanently remote in my job. When I was hired, I was given a generous budget to buy whatever home office equipment I needed including whatever laptop I wanted. I was free to either buy a MacBook or a PC - if I bought a PC, I was required to wipe the OEM Windows OS and install whatever Linux distro I wanted (which is the choice I went with). I and a LOT of other employees run whatever Linux distro makes us happy. IT tracks the asset number, and that's it. There's no spyware...
That sounds ducking amazing, all I got for wfh was a $2 mouse and a Windows box that spends half the day failing to sync to OneDrive
The company I work for is one of many in the IT world that "gets it" that WFH is an advantage and makes employees happy.
No Windows boxes anywhere. Windows is banned as a base OS (allowed in VMs only). It's OSX or Linux only. I'm good with that :-) Oh that generous budget was $3000 USD to spend as I wanted on whatever equipment I wanted. Since I already have a desk, chair, monitor etc, I spent almost all of the budget on the laptop :-) It's a good'un. Hehe
Companies don't trust their workers because they don't treat them well enough to earn their trust.
So to avoid the trust issue they just implement more and more draconian techniques to make up for the lack of pay/vacation/respect.
It honestly might even be cheaper than just being nice to your employees. So yay? Profit?
I personally do not trust any company provided equipment. I would never do anything untoward within the eye of their cameras. I work from home and I set up a second wireless network for all my work gear, and firewall rules to prevent them from talking to anything on my networks. I also use an external webcam that is usually turned off (electrically, as in no power flowing), and even my microphone goes through a sound board that can completely turn off. Bonus points is that I can also turn my mic down on my board, or pad it to hell and back and even if the meeting software lies about me being muted, I know for sure thanks to my trusted hardware.
Sounds like an arms race due to mutual distrust.
Surveillance cold war?
And studies show people are just as productive putting in 30h as they are 40. So let's do that. And people will have more free time and be able to focus more on the work at hand.
And make this spyware illegal.
I tape over my webcam when not in use. I wished I could run my own hardware and OS.
I've worked in IT for 20+ years, only in cases where management thinks a particular person isn't working, it doesn't happen. Cost plus IT departments are generally understaffed and don't have time to monitor this kind of thing makes it a non-starter
True until you have a micro manager, they're looking for a reason to fire you, or they're a big corporation who has money at the end of the budget a ton of bullshit coordinator jobs and they are thinking about layoffs, or finally they got bought by a vulture capitalist.
The only times I was asked to pull this kind of stuff was generally when somebody clocked in from home before the commute or remotely signed in and left for two hours. Sometimes I pull app activity to show adoption for a new platform and offer training. Otherwise nobody reads it.
Thankful to have a union that'd fight this.
'Probably' or 'Might Be?' I doubt this is as common as the article makes it out to be. IT departments have much better things to spend their time on and a good CTO will stop the nonsense before it starts.
You'll know if your employees are 'slacking off' because, like the article even states, their work won't be getting done.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In Australia, a woman said she was fired from her consultant role after her employer's monitoring software found "very low keystroke activity" on her laptop between October and December.
Time Doctor has seen business pick up over the past few years as remote work has taken off, Borja said, and the return-to-office movement hasn't eliminated the demand for employee-tracking software.
A March Resume Builder survey of 1,000 US business leaders with a primarily remote or hybrid workforce found that 96% of them use some form of employee-monitoring software, sometimes called bossware, to monitor worker productivity.
JPMorgan's monitoring system, for instance, tracks everything from office attendance to time spent composing emails, Insider reported last year.
At Tesla's New York plant, workers told Bloomberg that the company tracks how active they are on their computers — and that they've avoided taking bathroom breaks as a result.
Refusing to turn on your webcam during a meeting, for instance, could give your employer the right to fire you if you live in the US, legal experts previously told Insider.
The original article contains 678 words, the summary contains 175 words. Saved 74%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Hello, GDPR here, do you want to keep this software or do you want to keep your kneecaps?
I don't think that would fly in the UK but I'd just quit if my company tried that, don't give them an inch or they'll take a mile
I work in IT and have had people ask if I'm monitoring them and straight up tell them I quite literally have a million better things to do
It's insane how the metrics used to spy on employees have almost nothing to do with productivity!
Someone using a pad of paper and a pencil to take notes, voice-to-text to write email, or who is extremely skilled at using their office software will show up as “unproductive” using these metrics.
It quite literally rewards people for being inefficient. A task that takes a productive worker 10 minutes to complete can be dragged on for an hour so they look busy.
This level of micromanagement is a red flag that the managers aren't doing their jobs.