A majority of stuff mentioned in this article has to be outright illegal, if not borderline illegal when talking about privacy concerns. To get past it, they had to have put massive inclusions in their employee contracts and had employees sign off their entire existence to the company. It should also be noted that these happenings seem to all take place at sleazy, physical labor intensive companies. This isn't happening in any respectable sector I'd hope. I think the worst part is, is that these ideas are being created more and more by higher ups in companies and government who see no moral wrong in their plans. It doesn't affect them personally, but if it can be used in any way to further control a peon employee, then it's good for productivity. Even though it seems a bit like the article tries to defend this practice, there will never be a day on society where this is considered alright.
At the end of the day though, this is happening mostly to disposable workers who no on cares about. If one person complains about company overreach, well they can be replaced within 5 minutes. This is more something that lower income, down and out employees will have to worry about. This absolutely would not be tolerated to catch on to any respected industries/sectors. That's to not say physical labor workers aren't important, without them society would fall apart. It's that no one in authority typically cares about that type of worker and those employees concerns fall on deaf ears.
This isn't happening in any respectable sector I'd hope.
When a bigger company bought the smaller software company where I worked, almost the first thing they tried to do was change all the contracts to include things like universal IP claims and getting more visibility and control over things people were doing away from the office.
This culture was becoming pervasive even a few years ago, and the arrogance and contempt exhibited by the senior executive who came to tell us about it was almost unbelievable. It felt like he watched Darth Vader's "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further" scene and thought it was an instruction manual.
The only meaningful difference seems to be that since it was a software business, a significant proportion of the developers essentially telling them to shove their deal or we'd walk was powerful enough to put a stop to it. Obviously people working in unskilled jobs where staff are fungible aren't so lucky. We're supposed to have employment laws to protect people in vulnerable positions like that from exploitation, but welcome to 2018 I guess.
The Darth Vader quote rings true with me. I was working at a logistics firm in its in-house dev team. There was a constant push to increase employee tracking. Toilets were fitted with swipe card readers, we were encouraged to "give time" to the company for free, and we came under huge pressure to install various apps on our phones so that we were always "connected in" to company operations. Some people accepted this, some refused. When there was too much push-back management just implemented it anyways.
For example, I wrote the performance monitoring web application. Each employees manager would rate them 1 (good) to 4 (bad) on 10 criteria (e.g. punctuality, quality of work etc). The scores would be averaged and you'd end up with a 1 to 4 rating. I was asked to change it so that an average score greater than 2.2 would automatically become a 4 and also a manager could arbitrarily lower the overall score if they wished. So someone getting a 1 average could be moved to a 4 if their manager felt like it. This formula was baked in to everyone's employment contract, so legally the company would have had to notify all staff and get their approval to make the change. I raised ethical concerns but was told to implement it and not tell anyone, or risk getting fired. I told people anyway, I knew I wasn't going to be working there much longer.
You would think so but companies like google do this for facilities management to divine usage patterns and whether to devote more or fewer resources to something. To know if more efficiencies might be derived. But yes it’s pernicious.
Most bigco has full monitoring and logging of everything that goes on in their networks and on the work computers and mobile devices. A bunch require MDM software installed on computers that access the corp network, so if you 'bring your own device', you have similar logging & control. Also security cameras recording everywhere.
Employees tend to use work computers for personal communication, browsing and shopping. They can do some fairly personal things on those computers because they don't realize the amount of monitoring, and who looks.
Some countries have laws against looking into personal usage of work computers, like Austria. Most don't.
Didn't read the article - but I have an opinion. Surprise!
I work in Infosec, and I believe filtering of web access are absolutely critical to any tech company, so much so I that I consider the lack of basic cyber security as [users can't go to malware.ru or run executables with their normal account] to be incompetent and certainly against industry regulations.
Your work computer is not yours to browse reddit on, unless the company assumes the risk of doing so.
Now, some things like behavioral analytics, emotion detection, micromanaging time and whatnot, that's spooky, costs outweigh benefits, and so on.
I work in infosec as well. I think you are conflating two very different things, even if both technically involve monitoring/filtering/logging/etc.
The SOC at some company will use monitoring to combat threats, and will not have interest in any sort of micromanaging or other business-related monitoring.
This topic is about use of monitoring for the purpose of micromanaging, not security.
If the parent poster acknowledges the difference, I am fine with that. I agree that it would be shady to use detailed web filter logs and behavioral analytics for worker reviews.
Often times, the person who complains about web filtering at work would be the person who complains about for any reason.
At the end of the day though, this is happening mostly to disposable workers who no on cares about. If one person complains about company overreach, well they can be replaced within 5 minutes. This is more something that lower income, down and out employees will have to worry about. This absolutely would not be tolerated to catch on to any respected industries/sectors. That's to not say physical labor workers aren't important, without them society would fall apart. It's that no one in authority typically cares about that type of worker and those employees concerns fall on deaf ears.