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September 5, 2022: Workplace surveillance: a very Techtonic Labor Day

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Today: Workplace surveillance: a very Techtonic Labor Day

• The Rise of the Worker Productivity Score (NYT, Aug 14, 2022): “Radiologists see scoreboards showing their ‘inactivity’ time and how their productivity stacks up against their colleagues’. At companies including J.P. Morgan, tracking how employees spend their days, from making phone calls to composing emails, has become routine practice. . . . At UnitedHealth Group, low keyboard activity can affect compensation and sap bonuses. Public servants are tracked, too: In June, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority told engineers and other employees they could work remotely one day a week if they agreed to full-time productivity monitoring.”

“Architects, academic administrators, doctors, nursing home workers and lawyers described growing electronic surveillance over every minute of their workday. They echoed complaints that employees in many lower-paid positions have voiced for years: that their jobs are relentless, that they don’t have control — and in some cases, that they don’t even have enough time to use the bathroom. In interviews and in hundreds of written submissions to The Times, white-collar workers described being tracked as ‘demoralizing,’ ‘humiliating,’ and ‘toxic.’ Micromanagement is becoming standard, they said.”

[Even a hospice chaplain is included...] “Ms. Richardson and her colleagues had to project how many ‘productivity points’ they would accumulate during the day’s work. But death defied planning.”

• Here Are the Orwellian Details of the U.S. Patent JPMorgan Got Approved for Its Sprawling System of Spying on Employees (by Pam Martens and Russ Martens in Wall Street on Parade, July 8, 2022): “In 2018, Bloomberg reporters Peter Waldman, Lizette Chapman, and Jordan Robertson published a stunning expose on how JPMorgan Chase was spying on its employees, including after hours, using as many as 120 engineers from the data mining company Palantir Technologies Inc. According to the Bloomberg report, ‘It all ended when the bank’s senior executives learned that they, too, were being watched, and what began as a promising marriage of masters of big data and global finance descended into a spying scandal.’”

“But the surveillance program did not end. The bank simply developed its own proprietary spying system instead. Business Insider reporter, Reed Alexander, has reignited the scandal with the news that the internal surveillance program at JPMorgan Chase is now called ‘Workforce Activity Data Utility’ or WADU. According to Business Insider, the surveillance is fostering paranoia inside the bank with employees using the term ‘Big Brother’ and ‘1984,’ a reference to the George Orwell book.”

• Workplace surveillance is coming for you (Cory Doctorow, Aug 21, 2022): “The point of the [Pooey] Technology Adoption Curve is to normalize technological oppression, one group at a time. 20 years ago, if you were eating your dinner under the unblinking eye of a video-camera, it was because you were in a supermax prison. Now, thanks to ‘luxury surveillance’ [coined by past Techtonic guest Chris Gilliard], you can get the same experience in your middle-class home with your Google, Apple or Amazon ‘smart’ camera. Those cameras climbed the curve, going from prisons to schools to workplaces to homes.”

“The pandemic was a great accelerant for late-stage capitalism, converting our homes to rent-free annexes of our employers’ facilities, and turning ‘work from home’ into ‘live at work.’ Bossware, a fringe technological category, experienced a massive boom, rocketing up the privilege gradient. . . . when lockdown turned high-status white collar workers into home-workers, their bosses rolled out incredibly invasive spyware, including tools that watched them through their cameras, listened to their microphones, logged their keystrokes, scoured their hard-drives and read their text messages.”

... and then Doctorow gives this aside about Microsoft ...

“Office 365 went from being an online version of Microsoft Office to being a bossware delivery-system. The Office 365 sales-pitch focuses on fine-grained employee tracking and comparison, so bosses can rank their workers’ performance against each other. But beyond this automated gladiatorial keystroke combat, Offce 365’s analytics will tell you how your company performs against other companies.”

“That’s right – Microsoft will spy on your competitors and sell you access to their metrics. It’s wild, but purchasing managers who hear this pitch seem completely oblivious to the implication of this: that Microsoft will also spy on you and deliver your metrics to your competitors.”

“Even wilder is the further implication: that Microsoft might use the data its product gathers on your business – every keystroke made by every worker in the entire company! – to compete with you.”

• Striking Seattle Workers Win Against Surveillance Cameras in Vehicles (Joseph Cox in Vice, Aug 26, 2022): “Sandwich company Homegrown put artificial intelligence powered cameras in drivers’ vehicles. Now drivers will be allowed to cover them. . . . Earlier this month, Homegrown drivers entered their vehicles to find 4-inch cameras made by a company called Foresight Analytics that tracked their eye movements, listened in with microphones, and used facial recognition technology, the Seattle Times reported at the time.”

• EFF on Twitter (Sep 1, 2022): “You’ve never heard of Fog Data Science, but you should have. It’s the company turning your cell phone’s geolocation data into one of the most disturbing and wide-reaching surveillance systems ever used by police in the U.S. Read our investigation here.” (From the linked article: “Exposed to the light of day, Fog’s product becomes clear: an all-seeing eye that invades millions of Americans’ privacy without warrant or accountability.”)

• A Dad Took Photos of His Naked Toddler for the Doctor. Google Flagged Him as a Criminal. (by Kashmir Hill, NYT, Aug 21, 2022): “After setting up a Gmail account in the mid-aughts, Mark, who is in his 40s, came to rely heavily on Google. He synced appointments with his wife on Google Calendar. His Android smartphone camera backed up his photos and videos to the Google cloud. He even had a phone plan with Google Fi.”

“Two days after taking the photos of his son, Mark’s phone made a blooping notification noise: His account had been disabled because of ‘harmful content’ that was ‘a severe violation of Google’s policies and might be illegal.’ A ‘learn more’ link led to a list of possible reasons, including ‘child sexual abuse & exploitation.’”

• An Apple Watch for Your 5-Year-Old? More Parents Say Yes. (NYT, Sep 1, 2022): “As Apple prepares to unveil new models next week, the smart watch has found an unexpected audience: children as young as 5 . . . Apple has deliberately turned the watch into a device that can be attractive for children and their parents. In 2020, the company released the Apple Watch SE, which had fewer features than a premium model and was priced $120 cheaper. Apple also introduced Family Setup, software that let parents track their children’s locations, manage their contacts list and limit their notifications.”

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