[HN Gopher] School custodian refuses to download app that monito...
___________________________________________________________________
School custodian refuses to download app that monitors location,
got her fired
Author : docdeek
Score : 379 points
Date : 2021-04-13 12:42 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cbc.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cbc.ca)
| Lendal wrote:
| In a way this app is better for the employee, because the
| alternative is to have the employee punch a time card. In my
| wife's case, her time card machine is a web page. She has to
| start up a computer, sign in to the computer, sign in to the web
| page, and punch the virtual time clock. Some days she has been
| working 30 minutes before she starts getting paid. Same thing
| happens in reverse at the end of the day. So she must work a
| significant amount of unpaid time each day because the process of
| clocking in and out is itself so time-consuming.
| newsbinator wrote:
| A puppeteer script could solve that problem.
|
| You could have her phone ping a webhook (via Shortcuts on
| iPhone, for example) when she enters her work location, which
| then fires the puppeteer script to sign into the web page and
| punch the virtual time clock. And of course the reverse when
| she leaves.
| annexrichmond wrote:
| My mom was also not thrilled when her union (she works for Canada
| Post) made it mandatory for them to carry tracking devices
| justin_oaks wrote:
| I once had a coworker who refused to install a two-factor code
| generator (such as Google Authenticator, but there a dozens of
| alternatives) on his personal phone. I told him that he could
| generate codes any other way he likes, but the personal phone
| would be easiest.
|
| He wouldn't have lost his job but he wouldn't be able to gain
| production access, which required two-factor codes.
|
| He grudgingly installed a two-factor app. I'm sympathetic to the
| idea of "don't make me install stuff on my phone", but when it
| can be one of several apps, and the sole purpose of the app is
| retain a cryptographic key and run some hashes on it... I lose
| most of my sympathy.
|
| I suppose it'd be nice if that employer (I no longer work there)
| provided a device to generate the two factor codes, but I can
| understand why they don't.
| renewiltord wrote:
| It's very easy to solve this. Give your dudes a Yubikey and get
| them to use that. It becomes their responsibility to secure the
| Yubikey.
|
| Almost everything supports the new ones. And if they don't, use
| Okta for SSO and Okta supports that.
| ev1 wrote:
| I find this totally reasonable, especially since you can pick
| what app you want to install, and _it's actually useful for
| stuff outside of work_.
|
| For example, Okta Verify or Duo I would absolutely demand a
| separate phone for paid for by work - they are remotely
| monitorable/controllable more than local hashing.
|
| But you should be generating TOTP codes for your personal
| accounts too!
| tolbish wrote:
| The principle of the issue is requiring personal property for
| the job when there are well-known, safer alternatives such as
| the RSA SecureID. What happens if your phone freezes or
| completely dies? What if an attacker who can access the first
| factor of authentication can remotely access your phone?
|
| Why risk it?
| ev1 wrote:
| What happens when your RSA SecurID token dies, the office
| is closed, no one can provision you a new one unlike a
| TOTP?
| tolbish wrote:
| Your RSA SecureID being the point of failure is much more
| rare and much more harmless than your phone being the
| point of failure.
| asdff wrote:
| At least with duo you can have it just call a number. No app
| needed. Which is hillarious to see in a hospital setting. Get
| duo push from the desktop, the handset installed next to the
| desktop is often the one to ring. It stops being two factor
| when you can control both factors with one butt in one seat.
| qntty wrote:
| > but I can understand why they don't.
|
| And why is that? I don't know of any good reason besides not
| wanting to spend a trivial amount of money.
|
| I sometimes like to leave my phone at home when I go to work
| because I want to separate work from personal life. I would
| probably leave a job that required me to have my phone on me
| for work.
| zorrolovsky wrote:
| > but when it can be one of several apps, and the sole purpose
| of the app is retain a cryptographic key and run some hashes on
| it... I lose most of my sympathy.
|
| I can't see how having a choice of apps changes anything.
|
| An employer shouldn't be able to demand an employee to use
| personal property for work purposes against the employee's
| will. That's unreasonable, unacceptable and ethically wrong in
| my opinion.
| moftz wrote:
| Where I've worked, they will hand out RSA-style tokens that
| constantly generate new codes if you don't have a phone or
| don't want to install an app on your personal phone. There are
| even tokens out there that will totally replace any
| Authenticator-compatible app since the token is programmable.
| [deleted]
| Lev1a wrote:
| > I suppose it'd be nice if that employer (I no longer work
| there) provided a device to generate the two factor codes, but
| I can understand why they don't.
|
| I mean... aren't there quite literally devices whose sole
| purpose is to generate 2FA codes? Something with a form factor
| similar to a small keyfob?
|
| I do know these exist but I've personally never seen one "in
| the flesh". Also I can only imagine these (as a singular
| solution for all relevant employees) would probably also be
| easier to administer than a wild growth of different 2FA apps,
| most likely on different OSs and even different versions of
| those OSs, while over the years the churn of employees means
| the variation gets ever larger.
| unreal37 wrote:
| I used to have to carry around an RSA keyfob to be able to
| deploy code to production! I've had a few of those at
| different jobs!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_SecurID
|
| I've never had a job that required "Google Authenticator" on
| my personal phone. I guess I stopped working for other people
| long before that became the main 2fa method. That might be a
| step too far.
| indymike wrote:
| One of the best moves I've seen a cleaning service company make
| is provide a pre-paid smartphone to employees (and pay the bill
| if they worked over 15 hours per week). They had two problems:
| employees would get their personal phones shut off for non-
| payment, and they had push back on installing their mobile app.
| The shut offs were costing the company a lot of money because
| when they needed an extra person on a shift or someone didn't
| show up they couldn't reach the employee. Providing a phone also
| reduced turnover by about 14%.
| pluc wrote:
| Why are they calling those "tattleware" and not spyware?
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| Probably because the term "spyware" is already widely used for
| software which surreptitiously spies on the user without their
| knowledge, which is not the case here. Though I agree that
| "tattleware" is not a very good name. What about "jailerware"
| or "bigbrotherware"?
| pluc wrote:
| Doesn't this fit your description of "spyware"?
| a1369209993 wrote:
| They're defining "spyware" in part as requiring that (at
| least by design) you _don 't know ahead of time_ that it's
| spying on you. (Whereas the location-monitoring app openly
| admits that it violates your privacy rights.) That's
| arguably not a very good definition, but it's certainly a
| definition you could choose to use for a word.
| andrew_v4 wrote:
| At my last employer, we were asked to install some kind of
| authentication app (that wanted permission to access all kinds of
| files, peripherals, etc on the phone)
|
| I just told them I didn't have a compatible device - it's not so
| far fetched that people don't have an android or iphone.
|
| In the end they provided a clumsy web based workaround to do the
| same thing.
|
| Outside of tech, I can imagine many people, like the one in this
| story, are at a disadvantage because they don't know they can
| plausibly say they don't have a compatible phone, they don't know
| how to navigate a complicated workaround, and they may be afraid
| of losing their job.
| _jal wrote:
| > I can imagine many people [...] are at a disadvantage
|
| Yes, power differentials matter a lot. I have quit a job over
| things I considered overly intrusive, but a lot of people don't
| have that freedom.
|
| For that matter, I now keep a separate work phone. My employer
| doesn't require anything I object to, but just keeping all work
| apps off my phone was one consideration when I got it. But
| that's a big expense for a lot of people.
| type0 wrote:
| Why didn't they suggested to chip her, you know like some modern
| sheep farmers do. The APP dystopia is _APPalling_.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I believe you're being humorous, but this has come up in the
| past. One employer in Wisconsin did it to 100 employees
| (https://trainingindustry.com/articles/learning-
| technologies/...), though they did not make it a condition of
| continued employment. Some states have made it illegal.
|
| The explosion of smartphone technology has made chipping an
| infeasibly expensive solution in comparison; it hasn't dampened
| employer desire to do things like this.
| rideontime wrote:
| > Microchips can also reduce health care costs for employers
| by tracking factors such as sleep duration, blood pressure
| and activity levels. With this information, microchips can
| make recommendations on how employees can improve their
| health, says Dan Lohrmann, chief security officer and chief
| strategist for Security Mentor, Inc., and author of "Virtual
| Integrity: Faithfully Navigating the Brave New Web."
|
| What a load of horseshit. How does an implanted RFID tag
| provide anything but an employee badge that you can't lose?
| closetohome wrote:
| It doesn't. The authors don't seem to know the difference
| between an RFID tag and a microchip.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Why not strap an employee monitoring device to her ankle? :)
| chriswarbo wrote:
| At a previous employer we would only push changes to production
| when all regions were outside office hours, which ended up being
| around 3AM for us. Only a few people had access to push changes,
| which they did from home (run deploy script, go through a
| checklist of what should have changed, run revert script if
| there's a problem). They'd get paid for being on-call, and used
| an authentication app to access our systems.
|
| One day my boss asked if I would install this authentication app
| on my phone, so I would be able to push changes. I refused,
| stating that my phone is my private property. This resulted in
| quite a long conversation, with reassurances about security, etc.
| but I didn't budge. At one point they stated that my "argument
| wouldn't work" if it was on a company-provided phone. I
| completely agreed and said that would be fine, which seemed to
| surprise them.
|
| I don't think it had even occurred to them that I was being
| honest: I didn't want to install random things on my phone. I
| wasn't making up some excuse to avoid being on call in the early
| hours.
|
| (Of course, I also wasn't going to _suggest_ a way to end up on
| call in the early hours!)
| Forge36 wrote:
| I'll install anything my employer wants on my phone provided
| they've provided me with the phone :)
|
| How did your situation work out?
| ggregoire wrote:
| Surprisingly enough, I see a lot of people installing whatever
| tools their company uses on their personal phone/smartwatch
| _without anybody in the company asking them to do so_. It just
| seems like an "obvious" thing to do for people. I've never had
| to argue about it with anyone as you did, but if it happened I
| can already see the other person asking me, surprised, why I
| don't have Slack on my phone and how do I keep in touch with
| work outside of the office.
| codemac wrote:
| Android work profiles make this so easy - it doesn't appear
| as easy on iOS, but I was never a big iOS user.
|
| I don't mind using resources on my personal device, I mind
| the access to my personal information. Carrying two phones
| vs. one for isolation make sense, but if the isolation can be
| done in hardware/software on the same device it's much easier
| for me.
| asdff wrote:
| It's because people don't think of these implications, and
| software companies are deliberately dishonest these days.
| People are stuck in the mindset that tech companies are
| benevolent with their customers best interest at heart, and
| are somehow different in philosophy than those cold hard
| brick and mortar companies that only care about a dollar.
| This is why Chrome market share remains so high.
|
| They probably get an unsolicited email every 10 days, just
| like I do, from slackbot, asking them to install the slack
| desktop client to get a "better experience," because someone
| at work added you to the slack channel. Only they don't
| realize that the slack desktop app is just a second web
| browser dedicated to going to slack.com, that they are
| running while they are presumably running their first web
| browser. Slackbot doesn't tell you that you are wasting
| compute having two browsers open, just that it's 'better'
| somehow than running the site on the browser you already have
| open. It also isn't very clear that once you have slack open,
| all your coworkers can see you are "available" like its 2001
| and you are logging into AIM.
| ggregoire wrote:
| > It's because people don't think of these implications
|
| Even if they don't, I'd assume they would uninstall it as
| quick as they installed it when they start receiving
| notifications from colleagues during their break lunch or
| on the weekend. But it doesn't seem to be what the majority
| of people do. Not sure why people feel morally obligated to
| keep checking what's going on at work on a 24/7 basis.
|
| I wonder if there is a link with Facebook/Twitter
| addictions.
| CapmCrackaWaka wrote:
| I personally installed several of these apps because it
| allows me to respond to emails and messages while I'm not
| home (running errands, doing chores, playing hookie, etc).
| This, in turn, gives me much more freedom while working from
| home. To me, this outweighed whatever privacy issues people
| can come up with. Funnily enough, this has probably had the
| opposite of the intended effect, which is to increase
| productivity.
| ggregoire wrote:
| I was not talking about privacy issues but that's actually
| a good reason too.
| johncessna wrote:
| Hear Hear. What's worse is that corp software generally comes
| with corp governance and the ever so fun 'we can wipe your
| phone remotely in case it gets lost' policy.
|
| No. Way.
| justin_oaks wrote:
| Is it a requirement to own a personal smart phone compatible with
| the app in order to get/keep the job?
|
| I'm not sure why a physical "clock in, clock out" solution
| couldn't be used instead. Or have a shared terminal/tablet/phone
| where people clock in and clock out.
| mLuby wrote:
| Like animal sacrifice, worker surveillance is a lever the manager
| can pull to _feel_ and _appear_ in control.
|
| Okay that's a little harsh. It's more like drilling into
| someone's skull: it might work, but probably not the reasons you
| think ("to excise the evil spirits!") and there are almost
| certainly less harmful, more effective techniques you just don't
| know about yet.
|
| When we can reliably break Goodhart's Law (metrics that are
| targets aren't good metrics) maybe we'll outgrow our primitive
| hiring and performance rituals.
|
| Speaking of, since the metric is now "moves around the building,"
| do security guards and custodians ever carry the other's trackers
| for a while?
|
| Perhaps there are "custodial red teams" with orders to dirty or
| disable something and see how long it takes to be restored.
| sneak wrote:
| As a general rule, I don't install apps on my phone to complete
| most tasks. I have a few preselected e2e apps I use, but there is
| so much spyware in the App Store I am reluctant to engage with
| most apps.
|
| I have a separate burner phone exclusively for food delivery and
| uber.
|
| Beyond that, when a product or service tells me I need to install
| an app: I just don't.
|
| The more of us that take this approach, the easier it becomes
| over time for people like this person to refuse.
| [deleted]
| 24bug47 wrote:
| "We need to take a pause ... before we go down some path of being
| tracked all day, every day, wherever we are."
|
| Isn't it neat how we act like this is not already happening by
| governments, businesses, and employers? As if we have a choice to
| make right now whether we'd like to live in a world under "mass
| surveillance"?
| rideontime wrote:
| My employer isn't tracking me "all day, every day, wherever I
| am." Is yours?
| 24bug47 wrote:
| Only to the extent they are able. But you and I are being
| tracked regardless, by hundreds/thousands of other entities,
| commercial and government, to the extent they are able.
| 5G/IoT is the latest weapon in their arsenal.
| smitty1e wrote:
| So Dr. Strangelove: "You can't have privacy here; this is the
| land of the free!"
|
| We badly need to find a suitable level of tracking that is less
| than 100%, or the whole world is a tarted-up game reservation.
| 24bug47 wrote:
| Welcome to 5G...
| cwkoss wrote:
| It should be illegal for employers to request employees install
| anything on their personally owned devices or to retaliate
| against employees if they don't.
|
| Her employer could pay for another phone that she keeps at the
| school to use as a timecard/geofence - but I'd imagine a shitty
| employer that wants to implement this sort of system is only
| willing because they can mandate free use of employee property
| they do not own.
| [deleted]
| jb775 wrote:
| This should be illegal. The crazy thing tho is this tracking is
| currently possible to do within any building by measuring
| reflected wifi signals.
|
| I think that's the next wave of privacy concerns when we need to
| worry about privacy via relative physical measurements not able
| to be "locked".
| modzu wrote:
| replace the human race with robots
| Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL wrote:
| Kind of surprised almost no comment (no comment I've seen, at the
| time of writing of course) takes into account the circumstances
| stated in the very first sentence of the article.
|
| The job was partly about _disinfecting surfaces_ in _schools_ in
| the midst of a _pandemic_ ; I'm not saying that makes it
| excusable, or that this case shouldn't have been dealt with
| better, but in the context of governmental contract tracing apps,
| lockdowns, constant and various limitations put on freedom of
| civilians in order to fight the pandemic, I think we can see how
| even a good willed employer might (wrongly) feel entitled to
| demand such a thing.
|
| Privacy in the midst of emergencies (we can debate the exact
| scope of the emergency at hand of course) can be a slippery
| thing.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| That makes it _worse_ ; location tracking replaces more
| effective means of measuring job performance (like actually
| inspecting things in person), and hence _reduces_ the
| confidence that surfaces are being properly disinfected.
| (Albeit probably not by much, since anyone who thinks location
| tracking is a good idea probably wasn 't doing proper
| inspections anyway.)
|
| > Privacy in the midst of emergencies [...] can be a slippery
| thing.
|
| No. In privacy, as in computational complexity, the worse case
| is the single most important non-aggregate measure, and the
| second most important measure period, after average case.
| korethr wrote:
| I know someone who works for one of the major US pizza chains. He
| was faced with a similar request. At first, it was just a polite
| request. Then it became a condition of employment. He rightly did
| not want a pizza corporation tracking his every move 24x7. His
| solution was to buy a 2nd phone to be his 'work phone'. Said work
| phone gets left in the vehicle he delivers pizzas with, and gets
| turned on and off with the start and end of his shift. His
| position being that if his employer requires his location data as
| a condition of employement, then his employer will have only that
| location data relevant to his duties.
|
| I can understand why a pizza chain or other business that
| delivers food would want this info. How often has it been that
| you've ordered a pizza, or Chinese, or tacos, and found yourself
| wondering, "Where the hell is my food? I'm hungry _now_." With
| the tracking of delivery persons, you can pull your magic
| rectangle out of your pocket and see that, oh -- the driver is
| stuck at that one intersection where the thrice-damned stoplight
| takes at least 10 minutes to cycle -- the same light constantly
| camped by traffic cops who issue tickets to everyone who does an
| illegal turn leave the intersection for an alternate route.
|
| However, not everyone has the means to do what my friend did --
| buy a second phone. And people are right to worry about how their
| off-the-clock location data will be abused and fall into
| malicious hands.
|
| I suspect we're going to see more and more employers pushing
| towards mandating location tracking, even ones with less legit
| business needs than food delivery. I can only hope we'll see
| pushback against that.
| briffle wrote:
| Just think about Uber and Lyft. the core of their business is
| to track your exact location, so they can route you to the
| closest pickup. On your personal device, since your a
| contractor, not an employee.
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| To be fair, you can change your settings to make sure you
| only share location data when the app is open... which makes
| sense for this kind of service.
|
| You also don't even need to allow location at all if you
| don't want but then adding your pickup location and
| destination become very difficult (probably designed to be
| that way).
| nophone2134 wrote:
| Reminds how in one of my previous jobs I was _the only engineer_
| out there with a work-issued phone. This wasn 't some early-phase
| startup with 10 people on board - rather an unicorn getting ready
| for the IPO. I actually got into argument with my boss a few days
| before I started, as I did not want to install stuff on my
| personal phone (it wasn't spyware, but still). It's really an
| "achievement" when I think about this now - they've managed to
| burn my goodwill and demoralize me even before I started. Why
| should I care about this job if you start by invading my privacy
| from day minus one?
|
| Going to the office on my first day I was 50% convinced it will
| be also the last. I wasn't much worried about this perspective;
| I'm in really good spot career wise. Ultimately they've agreed to
| give me a work phone. However, this situation left a pretty bad
| taste. Turned out there were other culture problems in that place
| (who knew!) and I did not stay there very long.
|
| I feel sad for people who don't have privilege to just quite and
| find another job when their employer makes unreasonable demands
| like the one here though.
| bitwize wrote:
| I lasted 3 weeks at a place that opened by asking me to sign a
| contract giving them rights to use my name, face, and voice
| "for marketing purposes" which is about 3 weeks longer than I
| anticipated to last after I said no.
| UweSchmidt wrote:
| Technology rapidly increases the potential to gather and evaluate
| information about employees, increasing all sorts of pressure
| first on the lower caste of society, increasingly also for HN-
| type jobs.
|
| We need strong limits on employee surveillance, including
| transparency to the employee what information has been gathered
| and a fundamental understanding that people can act 'normal'
| during their workday: Having an occasional random break, an extra
| 2 minutes in the bathroom or a short private conversation with a
| coworker.
| gambiting wrote:
| " telling employees to download an app on their personal phones
| that would check their location and ensure they were working
| their scheduled hours."
|
| That's 100% illegal on this side of the pond at least, if the
| company wants an employee to use an app they can provide a
| company phone. Then sure, whatever, she could switch the business
| phone off after hours, no problem at all.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| On the other hand, here in the UK you cannot claim unfair
| dismissal until you have worked somewhere for at least 2 years
| so...
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| I'm not sure that's completely correct though I'm not an
| expert. If the company fired you for a reason which is
| illegal and were stupid enough to tell you then I think you
| would still have recourse. If they fired you for some other
| plausible reason then, yeah, tough luck.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| If you've been there less than 2 years, they're not
| required to provide the reason. It's "at will" employment
| like the US. Like you say, if they stupidly choose to say
| something you might have a case but why would they?
|
| https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/work/leaving-a-
| job/dismiss....
| skynet-9000 wrote:
| Or just leave it on her desk at work. She could be working
| 24x7! If anything, this makes work hours fraud even easier.
| kaiju0 wrote:
| Company is responsible to provide the hardware. The only issue
| I have is the use of personal equipment.
| ryandrake wrote:
| This should be the answer. If the company requires the use of
| an "app" as a condition for doing a job, it should also
| provide a device that can run such an app. Is the janitor
| also required to bring her own mop from home to use on the
| job?
| nowherebeen wrote:
| Yes, asking employees to put spyware on their personal phone
| is crossing a line.
| barsonme wrote:
| > That's 100% illegal on this side of the pond at least
|
| Interestingly enough the app is built by a company in the UK.
| mhh__ wrote:
| If I recall correctly we also produce a lot of medicinal
| cannabis despite it still being pretty much illegal and as
| good as not recognized as a treatment for anything.
|
| The UK is a rich man's country
| deaddodo wrote:
| The app isn't the problem, the hardware is.
|
| And also the company's ability to trust their employees, but
| that's another discussion.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I strongly suspect that if this isn't a direction society wants
| to go, we're going to have to pass laws constraining employers
| from requiring this sort of thing. In the US at least, I'm not
| aware of any law that restricts this kind of requirement at
| present, and many states basically allow an employer to fire an
| employee for any type of (non-protected-class) non-compliance
| with policy.
| gumby wrote:
| Hourly pay is part of the problem. The school is hiring agency X
| to get certain tasks accomplished (have people come in in the
| morning to find empty rubbish bins, clean floors and toilets,
| etc). They pay a fixed fee for this service.
|
| But the agency pays by the hour rather than "by the piece." They
| clearly estimate a cost per day; if someone can do the job in
| less time (or more time) should it matter?
|
| I think it's OK if employees have to check in that they were
| there at all (early diagnosis that the customer will be unhappy /
| first line of defense for an unhappy customer). Security guard
| evidence of walking around has been accepted for decades.
|
| But I don't think custodians need this high level of resolution.
| It doesn't lead to a good place for employee _or_ employer.
| windex wrote:
| A lot of jobs seem like modern slavery. Rather than focus on the
| deliverable, managers and people who pay money focus more on the
| "controlling someone" aspect. Tech has enabled this in a big way.
| minikites wrote:
| Why do you think so many US businesses fight against universal
| healthcare? Employers want every possible measure of control
| over their employees that they can get.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| There's a similar ugly dynamic at work with H1Bs,
| particularly in tech.
| asdff wrote:
| It's very ugly in graduate schools too, for grad students
| and postdoctoral researchers who aren't paid much better
| (salary is maybe 40-50k). In many west coast cities, rents
| over the past decade have gone up like 60%. Graduate
| student stipends on the other hand, have heald pretty
| steady around 30k during that entire time. These are people
| with a bachelors or even a masters degree, working on
| things like disease, being paid less from a government
| grant than a McDonalds worker in Fresno. Oh, but it's
| "training," so working for less than minimum wage is seen
| as OK. It also doesn't help that any professor who hears of
| the 30k stipend goes "Golly, back in my day decades ago
| when rents were a full order of magnitude lower, I only
| made half that!" without any realization of the words
| coming out of their mouth.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| I don't think it's true at all that businesses are against
| universal healthcare. Businesses want very much to have
| nothing to with providing employee healthcare, thus the
| opposition to Obamacare.
|
| But if someone offered to take it off their plate, absent
| proportionately higher taxes, I cannot see any business
| outcry.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Big businesses with younger, white collar employees
| certainly gain a competitive advantage by getting a tax
| benefit for paying people via health insurance subsidies.
| Their risk pool is healthier, so the healthcare costs are
| lower, hence premiums are lower. Plus, obfuscated pricing
| always benefits the seller. The employer can lower the
| value of the benefit without the employee being able to
| accurately compare the costs to alternatives.
| nvusuvu wrote:
| I never thought about it like this. This makes a lot of sense
| and is blowing my mind. I've worked at the same company for
| the last 16 years partly because of fear of losing
| healthcare.
| makotech222 wrote:
| If you're receptive to that way of thinking, try taking a
| look into Marxist theories, which incorporate that way of
| thinking into a political philosophy.
| grecy wrote:
| Come and live in a country where healthcare is not tied to
| your job in any remote way, and see how differently people
| behave. It really is night and day.
|
| When my brother came back to Australia after 5 years away
| he said the biggest thing he noticed was not driving on the
| wrong side of the road, not the weather, not the food, not
| the accents - it was how people are treated at their jobs.
| cosmodisk wrote:
| Have a look at my 2nd earliest submission about full
| employment and the consequences it would bring, it's pretty
| refreshing reading.
| reilly3000 wrote:
| Absolutely true in my opinion. The cost of procuring and
| administering healthcare is one of the largest non-productive
| costs to most businesses. Its about retention and control.
| [deleted]
| bpodgursky wrote:
| I know you mean well, but nothing except literal slavery is
| slavery, and it's trivializing of enormous injustices to even
| lightly equate the two.
|
| Chattel slavery involved practically-legal murder, beating,
| children born into slavery, rape, and a laundry list of
| horrifying things. This is bad, but we can come up with a term
| for "oppressive labor conditions" which is not "slavery".
| ohhhhhh wrote:
| It also implies that it's not a consensual agreement with
| your workplace. If you can figure out how to live your life
| without working, youre allowed to. Slaves... not so much
| morelisp wrote:
| _Experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages
| only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than
| chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down
| with the other. There is nothing more common now than the
| remark that the physical condition of the freedmen of the
| South is immeasurably worse than in the time of slavery; that
| in respect to food, clothing and shelter they are wretched,
| miserable and destitute; that they are worse masters to
| themselves than their old masters were to them. To add insult
| to injury, the reproach of their condition is charged upon
| themselves._
|
| An amazing point getting recognized more and more.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Now we have people being born into practically eternal
| poverty and forced to toil constantly under horrible
| conditions in order to avoid economic punishments.
| ohhhhhh wrote:
| If only everyone had a choice in where they spend their
| time and energy. Oh they do.
| asdff wrote:
| If only everyone had the money and time to actually make
| that choice. If you are living paycheck to paycheck, that
| means you can't afford to move without going into more
| debt. Moving costs money, even just moving across town.
| I'm usually out a good 1-2k when I move apartments just
| in my town after all application fees and deposits have
| been paid. My last landlord was a management corporation
| that figured out a way to whittle down my $1800 security
| deposit from my last apartment to $38 from things like
| "scratched floors" and "dents," so the deposit is rarely
| that. If I was broke, moving would be impossible.
|
| If you are broke you are gonna have an impossible time
| lining up work wherever you are going. No low skilled
| place is going to hire an out of area candidate when
| there are local applicants. You will have to show up from
| say, expensive south central LA to 'cheaper' boise,
| having spent hundreds of dollars in gas along the way,
| and now need to put money down on a security deposit.
| Since your credit is probably bad since you are broke,
| you will probably have to pay a huge deposit. My very
| first apartment when I had no credit asked for three
| months of rent as a deposit. If you are broke you don't
| have money for gas or these deposits, and will have had
| to go into debt. So now you are in a new area where you
| no absolutely no one, with no job, thousands in debt. You
| might spend the rest of your working life trying to get
| out of the hole you just dug for yourself, and that's
| assuming you don't get sick along the way.
|
| It's no wonder why so many people are homeless, and why
| most of the working poor in cities like LA live in
| overcrowded apartments rather than "going elsewhere" like
| wisecrack comments on the internet seem to suggest they
| do. I don't think people on this board have any concept
| of how expensive it is to be poor in this country, and
| this comment is case in point.
| simple_phrases wrote:
| Chattel slavery is only but one kind of slavery.
| [deleted]
| simple_phrases wrote:
| "Slavery with extra steps" often comes to mind.
| DC1350 wrote:
| It's slavery as a service. Great for saving costs because you
| only pay for the time that you actually use, and you can
| outsource the maintenance of the service to the provider.
|
| If real slavery was still legal it wouldn't even be used
| because the paycheque to paycheque employee model is so much
| more cost efficient.
| simple_phrases wrote:
| Yeah, you need to feed, house and give free healthcare to
| slaves. That's not happening any time soon.
| drummer wrote:
| It's coming. "You will own nothing and be happy."
| asdff wrote:
| I wonder what it is going to look like when finally every
| single dollar you have is sucked up automatically by the
| month. The scales tip by the year. People in major cities
| are already paying 50% of their wages to their landlord
| alone. That's a degenerate economy, not a productive one.
|
| Eventually we will reach an equilibrium where there will
| be just enough vultures out there to eat exactly how many
| slices there are left in the pie. Complete extraction of
| 'disposable' income will be achieved this century. For
| working people in major cities, some are already being
| completely extracted like this, having to work multiple
| jobs to keep a roof overhead and bellies fed with no time
| to do something that isn't low skilled labor for capital.
| phibz wrote:
| My response to this request would be "I do not have a smart phone
| for work." On the few occasions I've been asked to be on call for
| a job this has been my reply. It usually gets a "okay we will
| provide you with a phone," which is a better solution. Then I can
| choose when and where to turn it on and issues with the device
| are their responsibility.
| yardie wrote:
| This policy wasn't instituted by the school but by the custodial
| contractor. Also, these kind of traditional gig jobs are
| extremely cutthroat. Like I don't even see why the employer would
| even bother. If the worker didn't do the job the contractee would
| complain, a new crew would be assigned, and the old crew may get
| fired or sent to a different site.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >if the worker didn't do the job the contractee would complain,
| a new crew would be assigned, and the old crew may get fired or
| sent to a different site.
|
| Yes, that's normally how this works. And that's how this works
| at the low end.
|
| But when you're the custodial/landscaping/whatever body shop
| for a school/highfalutin office park/etc. your value ad is in
| the image. These types of body shops do all sorts of stupid
| things to basically broadcast the image that they hire the good
| poors and not the dirty poors. E.g. they'll hand out uniforms
| with collars, only hire people who speak English and are free
| of tattoos, etc. etc.
|
| This tracking app BS is just a way for them to add "look, we're
| accountable, you can track your contractors with an app" to
| their website so that some Karen with the company card is more
| likely to call them up and buy their services.
|
| It's not about getting the job done more efficiently. It's
| about projecting an image to the customer.
| acomjean wrote:
| One of the weird things is how often you are tracked just by the
| building sensors. Your phone really track you but there are other
| ways.
|
| In the Isabella Stewart Gardener heist documentary they looked at
| when the motion sensors where triggered in each part of the
| museum (this was in the 1990s) to get a sense of how long the
| thieves were in the building and where they went.
|
| When I worked at a home power monitoring company (monitoring by
| circuit breaker), we could tell very clearly that no one was home
| at my bosses house when he was on vacation (his house was one of
| our test locations). It was a little wierd.
|
| A higher up got was told by their spouse when he noted she was
| home early and she asked how he knew (he was monitoring the power
| usage). that he could keep his toys but don't talk to her about
| it. Someone wondered if they should talk to the dog walker about
| how the walk was really short on tuesday.. We switched to
| commercial monitoring thankfully.
| agustif wrote:
| https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
| piokoch wrote:
| I think this is not something bad in itself - such practice is
| well known, for instance truck drivers are being tracked
| routinely and nobody makes a big fuss about that. But this is
| unacceptable:
|
| "telling employees to download an app on their personal phones
| that would check their location and ensure they were working
| their scheduled hours."
|
| Why someone is obliged to install something on a private phone?
| What if someone does not have smartphone, what if that phone will
| stop working, who is to blame, who is responsible for fixing it,
| how quickly - will an employee sign SLA for fixing the phone?
|
| Employer should provide a phone for an employee and then whatever
| employer wants can be installed there. If something does not
| work, well, it is up to employer to provide support.
| cronix wrote:
| Is the truck driver tracked, or the truck? If the driver leaves
| the truck, are they still tracked? I think there is a
| difference between a vehicle being tracked, and an individual
| person.
| NullInvictus wrote:
| > truck drivers are being tracked routinely and nobody makes a
| big fuss about that.
|
| I know a number of truck drivers and they _hate_ it. Routing
| software is imperfect, accidents happen that have to be
| detoured, and every detour is another grilling by management
| who is staring you down like you're an inbred imbecile and
| asking "Why did you deviate?" They often well know why, but the
| procedure is clear. You just don't hear about it from truckers
| because the job is mercurial - turnover is high because the
| conditions suck, and its a lower item in a laundry list of
| grievances that truckers have.
|
| And if I'm frank; A lot of people don't hear about it on this
| forum because they move in a different economic circle.
|
| Being constantly overwatched and second-guessed is demeaning.
| It ruins work-place dignity, ensures there is no sense of trust
| between labor and leadership, and removes any feelings of
| agency from the laborer. As with any data-collecting system, it
| will also be relentlessly gamed.
|
| Worse, you can have your cake and eat it too. You almost never
| need momentary data like this to check-and-balance your
| workplace. Why track drivers relentlessly when you can do
| statistical data analysis on order completion, fuel
| consumption, route times, and other models that allow you to
| average out all the chaos?
|
| Results will speak for themselves, relationships will pay off.
| The solution to this 'problem' already exists, it's engaging
| with your workforce and focusing on results. It is bad. It's
| dehumanization in the workplace. The system worked just fine
| when people clocked in, clocked out, and the manager looked and
| said, "Yep, that hall is clean."
|
| I wouldn't accept a keylogger, or strict grilling of my web
| history. I wouldn't accept being sleuthed on by my manager
| either. Humans deserve a base level of dignity in the work-
| place.
| Kye wrote:
| I got to hear about these truck systems from the subject of
| it and from someone who used to implement it in the same
| thread once (don't have a link). _Everyone_ eventually sees
| that it 's rotten, and the implementer in this case got out
| of the business once they realized the harm they were
| enabling.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| I used to write that sort of software. We would coach the
| dispatchers on how to use the system. If they used it that
| way most of the time the drivers would start to vandalize the
| system in some way pretty much every time. We would then talk
| to the drivers and make sure the dispatchers would use the
| system correctly too.
|
| Every group though would go though the 'you are spying on me'
| to 'love it'. Recover 1 or 2 stolen loads and suddenly that
| entire terminal would love the thing. Also at the time
| electronic logs let most drivers get a pass from the cops.
| The cops would take one look at it and nope out. I doubt it
| is that way anymore. Most of the time we encouraged the
| dispatchers to look for deviation of norm and encourage the
| drivers to note it (most systems have this built in) and it
| is in the law anyway even when you had to do it by hand.
| Mostly it caught that one group of dudes who had particular
| strip joints they would swing by on the clock. Which was a
| more of 'dont care you go, but I am not paying for it'. This
| usually made them even more mad. Mostly because of
| embarrassment, and the loss of income. Your idea of 'average
| it out' is exactly how it used to be done (and is still in
| some cases). But the thing is LTL, short, long haul has
| _razor_ thin margins. If your average is higher than someone
| else 's they will beat you out in the end. You add in more
| tracking (because your competitor will) as you need to find
| those spots where the average is not right and skewed because
| of years of doing it a different way.
|
| If you have dispatchers getting mad for a 20 min deviation
| then the dispatcher is using the system wrong. The proper way
| to correct that is for the drivers to talk to them and use
| the built in messaging systems. If that does not work,
| document it and take it up with his boss or the shop steward.
| The dispatcher is probably hot because he had to pay OT to 3
| other guys who should have clocked out 2 hours ago because
| you are late and now they left and no one to unload your
| stuff. His boss is mad at him because he is 6% overbudget
| again this month. All because some DOT guy in another state
| is 6 weeks behind doing their job and has half the interstate
| down to 1 lane for 30 miles.
|
| Given all of that. I would never be a driver. It is a low
| trust environment... Hence the tracking.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| False. Truck drivers are not tracked. Trucks are tracked.
|
| Truck drivers are often in their trucks but they are not
| personally tracked. There is a difference. If the sanitation
| workers mop and bucket were tracked it would still be silly but
| much less offensive than asking someone to download a tracking
| app on their personal device that much be with them at all
| times.
| rurp wrote:
| > truck drivers are being tracked routinely and nobody makes a
| big fuss about that.
|
| This is not true. There have been some massive protests from
| truck drivers over this issue and it's a big turnoff for many
| potential and current drivers.
| CivBase wrote:
| > Employer should provide a phone for an employee and then
| whatever employer wants can be installed there. If something
| does not work, well, it is up to employer to provide support.
|
| Buy a scanner. Put it in somewhere the building which is
| accessible by employees (eg custodial office). Give each
| employee a unique, scannable card with which to identify
| themselves. Instruct employees to clock in and out by scanning
| the card.
|
| Mission accomplished. No phones or location tracking necessary.
|
| What this person's employer did should be illegal, and that
| extends to other industries as well. A shipping company can
| track their trailer or their shipments, but they shouldn't be
| allowed to track the truck driver himself.
| derefr wrote:
| Devil's advocate: I think the idea with the app isn't to
| figure out if you're in the building, but rather whether
| you're _moving around_ within the building in a manner
| consistent with the fingerprint of doing your particular job.
| A janitor _could_ clock in and then just sit around in the
| custodial storage area doing nothing, and a card-based system
| would be none the wiser. But the app would identify that as
| "not working."
|
| The app isn't to know whether you're on the clock; the app is
| a digital whip cracker to keep employees constantly working
| 100% of the time that they _claim_ to be working.
|
| ---
|
| Which, _in theory_ , wouldn't be a bad thing... _if_ this was
| combined with a sufficient number of break-minutes per day,
| to be spent flexibly. Whenever you 're not doing the "doing
| your job" movement pattern, the app could automatically mark
| you as being on break. _If_ they calibrated the number of
| break-minutes to the actual average observed productivity of
| employees in each role across the industry, then the app
| would have a useful output -- allowing employers to figure
| out who 's doing less work than average. (And
| employees+unions could _also_ use the data as evidence for
| uncompensated overtime disputes.)
|
| But of course such a system won't be used/configured that
| way. Employers will instead wrong-headedly assume that their
| employees should be capable of productive output 100% of the
| time that they're not on their 90 minutes per shift of
| legally-mandated break time; and then will randomly
| punish/fire employees for taking "extra" breaks, even when
| those "extra" breaks merely bring them to the industry
| average level of productivity.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Or they could have some check if things are cleaned. We
| accept so much detailed tracking when in reality it is
| unnecessary and open to abuse.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I imagine more detailed tracking will result in lower
| insurance premiums as culpability can be more easily
| established. This will give a competitive advantage to
| those that implement detailed tracking.
| rland wrote:
| You can either pay someone $20 an hour and give them a
| sense of responsibility, autonomy, & pride, or you can
| pay them $10 an hour and just coerce them to do the job.
|
| Which do we reward?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Based on the proportion of businesses that exist
| utilizing the latter, it indicates we are rewarding the
| latter. Most people are very price sensitive.
| ipaddr wrote:
| The cost of the tracking plus the cost of employee moral
| disappearing won't give you that competitive advantage
| plus the other extras youhave to do to maintain that
| rate (do you have a logbook of the times you had the unit
| serviced, semi-yearly maintance is required at your cost)
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It could (and does in my experience) as the cost of
| tracking goes down to practically nothing. If the
| employee has options to work elsewhere, then the employee
| morale might enter into the equation. But as far as I can
| see, even doctors and pharmacists are tracked nowadays.
| Drivers are tracked more than ever, dash cams are
| becoming regular. Call center employees have been tracked
| for a long time now. Hotel employees have iPads where
| they go through their checklist.
|
| And if you're indoors in a public business setting,
| there's a near certainty you're on camera for any big
| business. Of course, there's a difference in tracking
| minute by minute movement, but my point is that we went
| from no tracking to quite a bit of tracking already, and
| I don't see any reason why this won't become widespread
| either (absent laws preventing it).
| smolder wrote:
| It might not be a competitive advantage to disrespect
| your employees.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Unfortunately, there are large swaths of jobs where the
| employees don't have much choice, so there is no
| competitive disadvantage either.
| dcanelhas wrote:
| The article says that the app only logs when they
| enter/exit the geofence, not how they move around inside
| the building. Not to say that they wouldn't want to do that
| if they could, but GPS location is not really reliable
| indoors.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Yup. Anything metal messes with GPS. Phones have fallback
| modes but they can fail spectacularly at times. Even
| outdoors--sometimes my phone won't navigate sitting on
| the passenger seat (The GPS constellation guarantees a
| minimum of 4 satellites above the horizon, it doesn't
| guarantee 4 satellites in positions that won't be blocked
| by your car roof.) If you drive onto the property with
| your phone on your person or in a purse on the passenger
| seat the geofence might fail to detect it.
|
| There's a boss somewhere who didn't look into this well
| enough.
| geggam wrote:
| Easily fixed with subsonic transmitters or bluetooth
| beacons
|
| Both are used heavily in tracking apps ( think shopkick
| if it still exists )
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| I'll be completely honest: it's pretty easy to know if a
| building has been cleaned by just... being in the building.
|
| To me, this sounds like one layer of bureaucrats trying to
| justify their jobs. Truth is, with unionized school
| districts, for every custodian doing the job, minor
| maintenance and inspections, there are a few bureaucrats in
| offices looking at spreadsheet and attending government
| sponsored management seminars on how to streamline the
| organization...
| CivBase wrote:
| A janitor certainly could clock in then sit around in the
| custodial storage area doing nothing. They could also clock
| in and wonder around the building doing nothing. If the
| concern is really whether they are doing their job,
| management can easily verify by just checking whether the
| job was done.
| derefr wrote:
| You presume management has the capability to judge the
| quality of the work.
|
| Janitorial work -- like, say, being a sysadmin -- doesn't
| necessarily result in instant visible problems if you
| just decide to skip work one day. The problems are
| probabilistic, and often consist of smaller problems that
| compound over time. In this sort of job, you can
| frequently "get away with" not doing your job for a few
| hours, at the expense of working a bit harder the rest of
| the day; you can _sometimes_ even "get away with" not
| doing your job for a day or two, at the expense of likely
| having to do a bit of "fire-fighting" work when you get
| back, rather than only prophylactic maintenance work. In
| either case, your absence won't necessarily be noted, if
| you're not part of a team with a supervisor specifically
| attuned to the KPIs you're delivering on.
|
| In jobs where "when you're doing the job right, nobody
| notices", the reverse also applies: as long as nobody is
| noticing anything going wrong, then they assume you're
| doing your job.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| If nobody notices any difference then is there a problem?
| Why can't they work harder on even days and less hard on
| odd days if they want?
|
| In your sysadmin example if someone prevents problems
| from happening they'd look worse than someone who
| constantly reacts. This already happens, why make it
| worse with an automated system?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Some things might not be noticeable, such as disinfecting
| certain surfaces or performing routine maintenance such
| as cleaning filters until it's too late.
| kergonath wrote:
| You are not going to check if it has been done by
| monitoring where the janitor goes.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| Yep. This is why humans invented trust and consequences,
| though. Most people aren't dicks if you aren't dicks to
| them, and I'd rather discover the exceptions and fire
| them than treat everyone like one.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Trust doesn't scale. And scaling results in much bigger
| rewards.
|
| I'd say it's more accurate that humans have had to rely
| on trust due to lack of alternatives, but transparency
| will always be preferred.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| You don't need to scale supervision on janitors. You can
| just hire some people and pay them some money. If you
| can't afford enough supervisors to keep a vague eye on
| what's going on, live with dirtier buildings or go out of
| business.
|
| In general I think some things scale well and others
| don't. Why is it that HN recognizes outsourcing your tech
| to try and scale fails but other jobs aren't as worthy?
| CivBase wrote:
| > You presume management has the capability to judge the
| quality of the work.
|
| I presume there was a job which needed doing, which is
| why management hired someone to do it. Management may
| have difficulty evaluating the quality or extent of the
| work done on any given day, but they should at least be
| able to evaluate whether it was done at all.
|
| My point is location tracking doesn't provide management
| any assurances that the employee has done their job at
| all, much less how well they did it. It's a breach of the
| employee's privacy which doesn't even further
| management's goals any more than my privacy-respecting
| scanner solution.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > It's a breach of the employees privacy which doesn't
| even further management's goals any more than my privacy-
| respecting scanner solution.
|
| One of my businesses is currently involved in a lawsuit
| by someone claiming they suffered a loss due to injury
| from stepping on a landscaping rock (about 3in x 2in x
| 1in) in the parking lot. They apparently took a picture
| of the rock, which was adjacent to the curb. The lawyer
| is claiming the business is responsible for ensuring the
| parking lot is clear of obstacles.
|
| The crux of the case is not about whether or not this
| event even took place or if this person is faking it,
| they don't have to prove that without wasting a lot of my
| insurance company's money. The important part of the case
| is whether or not the business took reasonable steps to
| ensure the parking lot was free of obstruction.
|
| For this, the plaintiff's lawyer has deposed the
| facilities' manager, the landscaping company, and any
| staff working that day. All incredibly costly procedural
| tactics to try and get a settlement. Which they most
| likely will get from the insurance company.
|
| However, these legal costs might be avoided if I could
| produce electronic logs proving the facilities manager
| performed routine inspection duties. This is one example
| of when breaching an employees' privacy in the manner in
| question can further management's goal (and bottom line).
| CivBase wrote:
| I'm no attorney, but were I in charge of representing the
| plaintiff and you presented logs showing your facilities
| manager's locations throughout the day of the incident,
| my first question would be something like "how does this
| prove he verified the parking lot was clear?"
|
| It's the same issue. Knowing where the janitor was is not
| the same as knowing whether she did her job. Knowing
| where your facilities manager was is not the same as
| knowing whether he did his.
|
| Like I said, IANAL. I have no idea how well that would
| hold up in court. Regardless, I'm confident security
| cameras would be at least just as effective for defending
| your business in cases like this.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Because it's not about proving they verified the parking
| lot was clear. It's about proving the business did what
| is "reasonable" to prevent the problem. It's why those
| wet floor signs are so important. The business is being
| attacked, and the insurance company is looking for any
| holes in the defense.
|
| Any holes in the offense don't matter, because the
| plaintiff isn't going to suffer any loss, and their
| lawyer is working on commission.
|
| So the only person that stands to lose is business and
| insurance company. Insurance company will fight if it's
| open and shut, meaning they don't think they will have to
| risk a lot of legal fees trying to shoot down various
| plaintiff's claims.
|
| But if it looks like plaintiff could drag this out and
| find a possibility of culpability on behalf of the
| business, the insurance company will pay to make them go
| away. And the business' insurance premiums will rise.
|
| Security camera footage would of course be the gold
| standard in this case. But storing video for so long and
| having so many cameras is also costly. Using GPS to prove
| your employee did their duties of at least inspecting the
| parking lot by showing they walked around it at various
| times might be something the insurance company can use in
| their defense.
|
| Also, in my specific example, the plaintiff waited almost
| 11 months to file their lawsuit. These type of people
| know to wait as long as the legal system allows them to,
| to increase the likelihood the business has misplaced or
| thrown out records and memories get fuzzy.
| CivBase wrote:
| > Because it's not about proving they verified the
| parking lot was clear. It's about proving the business
| did what is "reasonable" to prevent the problem.
|
| If that's the case, isn't your business already going
| what is "reasonable" by virtue of employing a facilities
| manager whose job includes ensuring the grounds are clear
| of dangerous obstructions while the facility is in
| operation?
|
| Regardless, this scenario doesn't really jive with my
| assertion that it should be illegal for employers to
| track their employees. Were that the case, the court's
| definition of what is "reasonable" could not include
| maintaining records of your employees' locations
| throughout the workday, as doing so would be illegal.
| Although your scenario does at least provide a
| hypothetical for why a business would consider tracking
| employees in the absence of such a law. Hopefully courts
| never set a precedent to actively encourage that kind of
| tracking.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| In a civil suit, what's "reasonable" is up for debate,
| and it depends on how much you want to spend on lawyer
| time to prove it. The lesson is clear, if it's cheap
| enough, then arming yourself with more information is
| only beneficial to you. So much that it might make
| business sense to violate the employees' privacy.
|
| The ability to track people's precise locations due to
| the proliferation of smartphones and various wireless
| technologies is pretty new, and probably hasn't been
| tested in various court cases yet.
|
| I know at one point, it was enough to have paper logs of
| your drivers. But now, electronic GPS tracking is so
| cheap and commonplace, that the court might say as a
| business, it is your responsibility to utilize it to
| ensure your drivers are not regularly speeding.
|
| The problem with civil cases is there are few well
| defined standards. And if you're in the sweet spot where
| your business is doing well enough to be a nice target,
| but not well enough to have lawyers on staff who can deal
| with swatting them down, then you've got some decent risk
| exposure you need to address. And the best way to do that
| is to have as much information as possible.
|
| I'm sure the only reason this issue of tracking is coming
| up is only because it's so incredibly cheap to track
| them, since the employee already has a phone on them, the
| access points or wireless signals are already there, it
| costs almost nothing to physically download the app and
| enable functionality, and it costs almost nothing to
| store this data. At that point, it's a calculation of do
| we spend this minimal fee to protect from a host of
| litigation where we can prove this person was at this
| place at this time.
|
| I find that many of my friends who are office employees
| or haven't operated a public facing business are unaware
| of these types of problems that you don't have to deal
| with when you don't physically entertain random people of
| the public, thereby greatly reducing your risk exposure
| to these kinds of scams.
|
| >Regardless, this scenario doesn't really jive with my
| assertion that it should be illegal for employers to
| track their employees.
|
| Yes, if it was illegal, it would eliminate this problem.
| But my intent was to show that at least some of the
| impetus might not be to make the employees' life worse.
| admax88q wrote:
| > You presume management has the capability to judge the
| quality of the work.
|
| If they don't have that capability then they shouldn't be
| managing that type of work. That goes for any industry.
|
| You're not fit for management if you can't judge the work
| of those you are managing.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| The janitor is also, typically, the one who is going to
| sound the alarm first about things that need to be
| inspected in the building or further looked at.
|
| In a school district where they have custodial staff on
| the payroll (not contracted) there's also sometime a bit
| of on-call.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| But then checking where the janitor is, is like checking
| whether a programmer is typing.
| pasquinelli wrote:
| i'm a janitor and i hear about it any time i forgot to
| check paper products in a bathroom. managment are all
| experienced janitors that can easily tell if work's been
| done.
|
| i mean, a toilet might need to be descaled. the well to
| tell is to look at the toilet.
| spatley wrote:
| Nope
|
| If you cannot tell the space has been cleaned, get new
| glasses. If you can tell and it is dirty, give me a warning
| and then fire me. Otherwise nunyabizness
| Lev1a wrote:
| The place where I did my internship used electronic keys that
| one would have to activate when coming into work each day (at
| least one of those little wall mounted stations (not much
| bigger than a fire alarm trigger) for that purpose on each
| floor in the stairwells). It would then stay active and
| capable of opening doors for ~8 hours, ie. a normal work day.
|
| Also, a nifty feature of these things as explained to me by
| the on-site guy dealing with electronics (including the
| management of these keys): these keys could be managed in
| different ways, e.g. grouped for departments, grunts vs.
| managers etc. AND the settings didn't have to be flashed to
| every single key or every single activation station, but
| instead flashed to one key (like the one of this employee)
| who then went around to a couple of stations and "activated"
| his key again, thereby transferring the updated/new
| setting(s) to the station which would then update every key
| inserted into it etc. etc.
|
| Meaning the key management was quite literally "viral".
| cwkoss wrote:
| I bet they could produce 90% accurate data without any
| installations on personal phones, just watching for wifi
| beacons
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Just buy the data from telco providers - they already track
| your location by cell tower.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Low tech is the way to go. People want to equip electric cars
| with tracking devices to determine road taxes. It's like they
| don't realize each car has a yearly inspection and odometer
| reading. The added value of knowing exactly how many miles
| are driven in state or out of state will just be noise.
| peterburkimsher wrote:
| I used to work for an IoT startup that is doing vehicle
| tracking. Along with the main market of rental cars, the
| client also wanted to track rural vehicles for off-road
| distances.
|
| Over a few months, I designed and implemented an algorithm
| for counting the distance travelled off-road. It took a
| TomTom road map of the whole country (not a cheap license
| fee), divided the trip into pairs of points, checked
| whether each segment intersected with or came within 10m of
| a road, and finally made a total of the distance. There
| were deviations (odometer compared to on road + off road
| straight line distance) but it was good enough to be
| usable, and we shipped it. It also generated reports for
| reclaiming road tax for off-road driving.
|
| In practice, the client realised that our $7 per vehicle
| per month fee for the service will only save them $2 or $3
| in road taxes for their most off-road vehicle. Just because
| it's technically exciting doesn't make it financially
| logical.
| snow_mac wrote:
| This is something I've seen at places like Whole Foods. In
| the bathroom they have a digital card scanner. One day I saw
| an employee scan their ID, they said that they have to check
| on certain things every hour and scanning a badge in the
| bathroom tells their minders that "Hey, the bathroom was
| checked in on by an employee and thus should be in of good
| condition".
|
| I think something like that is fine and reasonable if your
| job is to move about a building.
| rrauenza wrote:
| Corporate security has something like this as well - there
| are little button shaped things on the wall everywhere they
| scan with their device as they make their rounds.
| j16sdiz wrote:
| It is called "iButton"
|
| https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00R3GRBD8/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_g
| lt_...
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I have a NFC app on my phone, read one of those buttons
| ... they left it unlocked, so I posted a message. Not
| sure anyone will read it, presumably they just pick up
| the location ID in an app. I guess someone could just
| clone the locations and sit in a chair and spoof it.
|
| Library books in my area use NFC, the tags weren't locked
| on the last book I checked.
|
| Probably not a security problem (ha!?), but you'd think
| the possibility of vandalism would cause them to be
| locked.
| ticviking wrote:
| I've often wondered how often NFC is unlocked like that.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| I've seen buildings where the buttons are 'burried' in a
| few mm 'deep' the wall, and painted over so that you
| don't notice them at all, the wall looks really smooth.
| The guards know where exactly the spots are, you see them
| waving their devices in a seemingly flat/blank wall, then
| the beep sounds, and they walk towards their next
| 'random' spot.
| xxpor wrote:
| Yep, those have been in retail stores forever. In the
| grocery store I worked in it was specifically for making
| sure there weren't hazards on the floor (like a broken
| jar that fell from a shelf) that someone could slip on
| and break their neck. It was required by their insurance.
| SllX wrote:
| Generally anywhere with security patrols, even outside
| some residential buildings and townhouses in San
| Francisco.
| mikeklaas wrote:
| This is partially due to liability: if someone slips on a
| wet spill and hurts themselves, Whole Foods is liable if
| they haven't been taking reasonable measures to clean up
| such spills in a timely fashion (1/hour). Scanning is a way
| to later prove that such cleaning was happening.
| moistbar wrote:
| I think most grocery stores have something similar. When I
| worked at Giant about 15 years ago, I used a self-contained
| scan gun (basically an overpriced Windows Mobile 5 PDA
| stapled onto a barcode scanner) when I had to do "the
| walk," which was the hourly store inspection. Decidedly
| lower-tech than even a badge reader, but it got the job
| done and my boss didn't have to know where I was during my
| time off.
| cosmodisk wrote:
| Back at home I used to see a schedule on a wall in most
| toilets(shopping centres, some public buildings) where rows
| with time slots were filled with names and signatures to
| ensure constant cleaning every 15-30 min.
|
| Carrying a phone with a tracker is a complete BS.
| mcguire wrote:
| I always wondered what prevented an employee from
| skipping several check-ins, then filling in the missing
| signatures/timestamps at one time.
| j16sdiz wrote:
| Random checks at random time.
| asdff wrote:
| This is also how Environmental Health and Safety ensures
| lab safety checks were done on things like the eye wash
| station.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| I worked retail in highschool during the 90s. It was
| exactly like this. Just because something is possible
| with modern tech doesn't mean it should be done or is
| better than bog simple stuff like a log book.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| As Meja sang some years back: _it 's all about the money_
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcXMhwF4EtQ)(cute song)
|
| Logbooks: someone needs to distribute them, collect them,
| read them, transfer the (many many many) written lines to
| a computer, validate the signature samples/writing style,
| etc. etc. An app that automates that in 2 mins is so much
| better.
|
| A solution could be: 1) give each employee a (corporate)
| cheap $100 android phone, 2) configure these to allow
| only 1-2 apps to 'escape' to the internet so the
| bandwidth is not wasted on updates or browsing, 3)
| provide a 1GB per year data plan, 4) ask them to switch
| on right before entering the 'site' and switch off right
| when they leave the 'site' 5) give them a monthly $5
| subsidy to keep it charged.
| Amezarak wrote:
| They don't need to do anything but distribute and maybe
| collect them. Typically they simply look at them
| periodically and make sure they're being filled out, and
| only closely looked at if there's some kind of incident.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| Yes and no.
|
| This would cover _some_ of the functions. How about
| overtime? How about 'less time'? How about an extra
| Sudnay because game/football/concert/office-party?
|
| The HR of each company would need this data to adjust
| salaries.
|
| I am not discussing incidents and/or user-access-
| management (apologies if my above comment was
| misunderstood). I meant it for time-tracking purposes. An
| app where one can add an exception note "I had to pop to
| X shop to buy Y material" would also help document and
| approve. Geofencing requirement makes sense in some lines
| of work and a work-phone (switched on only the work-
| hours) is a reasonably 'invasive' tool.
| irrational wrote:
| At my company, there are these black sensors on the walls
| around all the buildings. Security is supposed to patrol
| the buildings and they have to scan their badge at each
| sensor to show they were there.
| pas wrote:
| See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchclock
| dheera wrote:
| I think it's okay to track employees _while on the clock_
| for certain circumstances but that tracking should cease as
| soon as they are not on the clock.
|
| An app on a personal phone can violate this way too easily.
| The tagging system is a good way to do it and limit it to
| only being on the clock.
| SamBam wrote:
| I'd rephrase: it's ok to monitor that the _jobs are being
| performed_ , and sometimes this involves an employee
| doing something in a certain place at a certain time.
|
| Though highly-overlapping, this is not a 1:1
| correspondence with "tracking employees."
|
| You may need to know that a security guard visited this
| station at 1:00 and this station at 1:30. You do not need
| to track whether he was in the bathroom five minutes
| longer today that yesterday.
| bluGill wrote:
| A real guard needs to run a somewhat random schedule,
| otherwise attackers will figure out the pattern. I don't
| need to know how long you spend in the bathroom (unless
| it is excessive), that is just data that I happen to get
| by tracking to ensure there is enough randomness in your
| patterns. It should go without saying that guards need
| sufficient time to handle biology needs, and this varies
| a bit.
| dheera wrote:
| If you are so high profile that attackers are trying to
| profile guard movement patterns, you need more than 1
| guard, and they can take turns using the bathroom.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Stuff like this has also been around for decades. Detex
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchclock) was a
| manufacturer of Watch clocks that used a key at the
| inspection stations to verify that someone had been to
| inspect that location at a certain point in time.
| dghughes wrote:
| Watchclocks have been used for over a century. Guards or
| watchmen on patrol had to be at a specific spot at a
| certain time to prove they were not asleep. They had to
| prove via the clock that they were at that location.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchclock
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| LOL. Just noticed we posted the same link ;-)
| dghughes wrote:
| I wrote it at noon and never clicked reply until I was
| off work. I see another link too even earlier.
| adolph wrote:
| _To solve the problem, Burger-G contracted with a software
| consultant and commissioned a piece of software. The goal
| of the software was to replace the managers and tell the
| employees what to do in a more controllable way. Manna
| version 1.0 was born._
|
| https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
| crocodiletears wrote:
| I honestly hate that story with a passion. Not because
| it's bad, it's actually very compelling. But it presents
| two very dystopian futures which I perceive to be
| antithetical to human and individual dignity, one which
| is as miserable as it is likely, and one that I find far
| more disturbing and undesirable which it presents as a
| Utopia, which I hope never has a chance to come to pass.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| I'm curious: would I be wrong to assume you're not of fan
| of the Culture, either? In case you haven't the series
| ignore me :)
| ailun wrote:
| That's something Whole Foods uses for the subcontracted
| cleaning crews, not the directly-hired employees. They laid
| off all their maintenance crews a year before Amazon bought
| them.
|
| It's also not on the workers' personal phones, they have
| some old phones that they keep at the store with the app
| already installed.
| londons_explore wrote:
| You could consider the company is not hiring Mary-the-cleaner
| for $16.40 per hour, but is now asking to hire Mary-the-cleaner
| _and_ her phone for $16.40 per hour.
|
| That would put the responsibility on Mary to maintain the phone
| in working order, and the employer could refuse to pay unless
| both things they are paying for are present and correct.
|
| It's a scummy practice, sure, but hiring two things as a
| package isn't illegal in itself.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| Alternately, the company hired Mary-the-cleaner at $16.40 an
| hour, and is now asking for Mary-and-her-phone at the same
| rate. Which puts the responsibility on the company to provide
| the device they want her to use while she is working.
| unreal37 wrote:
| They didn't require "her phone" until after she was already
| working for them. They didn't hire two things "as a package".
| teachingassist wrote:
| > It's a scummy practice, sure, but hiring two things as a
| package isn't illegal in itself.
|
| I believe this would technically depend on whether one is
| employed or self-employed.
|
| Only self-employed people are generally obligated to provide
| tools of their trade; whereas, personal tracking strongly
| implies employment. It shouldn't be both. (This all may
| depend on jurisdiction and specific circumstances, obviously)
|
| Given that the article clearly says the person was employed
| before being required to download an app, this also feels
| like a breach of contract by the employer.
|
| In your terms: They employed the worker, not the worker and
| their phone.
| udhdhxnxn wrote:
| I routinely make a fuss about truck drivers. Dispatch will
| schedule them for back to back driving shifts and then call the
| cops on them if they decide they cannot drive safely and need
| to sleep. The cops are there to do a welfare check (harass
| them) to get them going again.
| dheera wrote:
| Fully agree. No employer shall tell me what to install on my
| private phone.
|
| Come to think of it this might be a really good reason to get
| an obscure phone (PinePhone?) as your personal phone so they
| can't do this.
|
| "Yeah, this is my phone, sorry, your app won't work with it"
|
| But regardless, employers should provide a work phone if they
| want an app installed, and the work phone should NOT have to be
| carried around 24/7 unless it's an on-call rotation, and in
| which case the rotation duty cycle should be limited to a
| reasonable number e.g. 10% or less.
| variable11 wrote:
| "I think it's fine to wear Stars of David - such practice is
| well known, for instance."
| soneil wrote:
| This seems so cheap/easy to get right it's nuts.
|
| Get the cheapest tablet you can find that's reliable and has
| GPS. Whack the location app on that. Stick a todo list on it
| that they can push items to. Sorted.
|
| Tie the todo list to the locations and leave it on the cart -
| you can track the work instead of the person. It doesn't matter
| if they've gone outside for a smoke, it matters that the work's
| getting done.
| [deleted]
| yesOkButt wrote:
| Maybe it's just me but I can see a very different liability and
| risk factor between a janitor and the operator of a multi-ton
| vehicle carrying a range of goods or hazardous materials to
| keep track of.
| Shivetya wrote:
| Decades ago we implemented a time card system which worked by
| having the employee use a phone at the location, many locations
| had one or more phones which could be used, to clock in and out
| of work. Since we used an ANI feed you could not spoof it; I
| cannot guarantee that is or is not possible to spoof now.
|
| I certainly cannot agree with requiring workers to use their
| own phone for this. if the company wants that app then it
| should provide the phone or use another means to guarantee they
| are on site.
|
| Truckers being tracked is because the penalties involved are
| very real and enforced for reasons of safety to drivers and
| other users of the nations roads. tracking someone cleaning
| buildings or homes is a bit on the absurd side as most of us
| agree
| ggvvfdde wrote:
| I routinely make a fuss about truck drivers. Dispatch will
| schedule them for back to back driving shifts and then call the
| cops on them if they decide they cannot drive safely and need
| to sleep. The cops are there to do a welfare check (harass
| them) to get them going again
| zdragnar wrote:
| Unless the driver has parked in an unsafe location (fire
| lane, impeding traffic, etc) I cannot imagine a police
| officer would give a damn about whether or not a truck driver
| was behind schedule.
|
| There are pretty strict legal limits (in the US at least)
| over how long a driver can be on the road without taking a
| break.
|
| In fact, unless they only hire owner-operators, falling
| asleep at the wheel and causing an accident will almost
| certainly jack up the company's insurance rates, much worse
| than them running behind an overly tight schedule.
| repiret wrote:
| Unless the cops were told they absconded with the truck.
|
| An abusive trucking company can accuse their drivers of
| steeling trucks or cargo when they're behind schedule. I've
| never heard of that happening, but I don't doubt the poster
| who said it does. It's too bad we don't come down harder on
| those who make such bad faith accusations of steeling.
| zdragnar wrote:
| I have no idea where you are from, but "absconding" isn't
| really something the police get involved in.
|
| Either the driver has a right to be in the truck, at the
| location he is at, or not. If he does, the police don't
| care, because there is no crime. If he doesn't, that is
| theft.
|
| If it is theft, they don't let the driver drive on with a
| promise to behave; the truck (and all the goods in it)
| get impounded to be claimed by the company and the driver
| gets hauled off to jail. That would be a way worse
| outcome for the company.
| elil17 wrote:
| Truck drivers are making a huge fuss about electronic logging
| devices (ELDs). They say these trackers reduce safety in a
| variety of ways. I recommend the "Over the Road" podcast which
| is where I learned about this.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Personnel location crosses a line to me. If you want to track
| location, put the locator on company property like the cleaning
| cart that custodians push around.
| neaden wrote:
| This might be legal, but it's still bad management. If you
| don't trust your employees and you don't think you can
| evaluate the results of their work, in this case if things
| are clean, that's on you as a manager to figure out. Tying it
| in to the process like this and you end up getting false
| flags when they spend a long time cleaning a mess, or reward
| them for not cleaning sufficiently to hit their movement
| metrics.
| michaelt wrote:
| A small minority of work can't easily be directly
| evaluated.
|
| If I hire a security patrol company, and they contract to
| provide a patrol that will visit twice a night and walk
| around the building, nonperformance would be almost
| undetectable.
| neaden wrote:
| There may be cases sure, but this isn't one of them.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| Punch clocks were standard 100 years ago. The nightguard
| was supposed to press the button on clocks dotted around
| the building when he passed them. No app on the personal
| phone required.
| ipaddr wrote:
| If a robbery or damaged occured you would know. If you
| audited the cameras. If you had a second employee.
|
| Tracking location by the second isn't necessary and can
| be defeated with a rc car and a piece of tape by a 6 year
| old or robot (the tommy robot from the 80s would be
| perfect) or drone if you want to stay upto date.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Fwiw, it's not tracking location
|
| > The app, called Blip, generates a geofence -- a virtual
| boundary, created by the employer using GPS -- that detects
| when an employee enters or leaves.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| In the article it says the app claims not to track location
| outside of the geofence, but it's unclear exactly what
| information is being tracked and where it is stored. I'd
| really be interested to compare the data transfer inside
| and outside that geofence.
| irscott wrote:
| My company wanted me to use the intuit TSheets app for
| clock in/out. This would do a similar thing with geofencing
| but would also notify me during times I wasn't at work that
| it was generating a geofence for my current location even
| though I wasn't even clocked in.
|
| Told my manager I simply wouldn't use it and why and he
| gave me permission to use the webapp on the company issued
| laptops.
|
| Last thing I need is my manager seeing me traversing the
| city drunk at 2am or whatever. I'm not on their time so
| whatever I'm doing is none of their business.
| overscore wrote:
| That is location tracking.
| input_sh wrote:
| What is that if not location tracking?
| barbazoo wrote:
| I understand location tracking as being tracked, i.e.
| someone knows where I am at any given time. Here it's a
| binary information. Inside the fence (place of
| employment) or not. Once you're out, all the employer
| knows is that you're not at work.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I despise this but it's not tracking
| strictly speaking.
| input_sh wrote:
| > Inside the fence (place of employment) or not.
|
| But to do that you have to share location permissions all
| the time with the app. And you have to trust it enough to
| give it those permissions.
|
| Also here's a solution with no app and no location
| tracking: detect when a phone has connected to on-premise
| WiFi.
| type0 wrote:
| How should anyone know this? Is this app open source?
| newman8r wrote:
| Are we sure that's all it's doing, or is geofencing just
| the primary function of the app? Does the app have no
| ability to save/track coordinates, and do the terms of
| service/privacy policy reflect that?
| amiga wrote:
| You know you need to track location for that to work,
| right?
| barbazoo wrote:
| Technically no, the client does not have to send the
| exact location to its server at all times to determine if
| the device is within the fence.
| duxup wrote:
| Agreed. Provide a phone at the workplace.
|
| Pickup phone at the start of the day, check in, toss it in a
| pocket and go to work. Check out, put phone in locker or some
| storage... done.
|
| But just to expand on that.
|
| I think this is one of those things that also kinda
| demonstrates a lack of faith and trust between the employer and
| employee and can be damaging to the whole relationship.
|
| When I had my first job as a manager (low level technical
| support job) I was a jerk. Not in what I said but in enforcing
| rules about what is on people's PCs and etc, because that was
| how that place operated so I did too. One guy on the verge of
| quitting asked me "Does any of this really matter / help me do
| my job?" I realized ... probably not / this was a total hassle
| for me, and him, and everyone. It was just a big distrusting
| type environment we had going on. I told him and the rest of my
| team "I'm not checking PCs anymore or anything like that, just
| be responsible, make good choices."
|
| What happened? The team was happier, and nothing bad happened.
| I was happier at work, so were they, and I saw customer
| satisfaction (granted that's a shaky metric) go up ... I assume
| because everyone was happier / more pleasant to talk to with
| the customers.
|
| Ages later... I still feel kinda dumb about the whole thing. I
| really emulated the whole asshole hall monitor type thing for a
| while. It was completely without value / detrimental.
| vidarh wrote:
| > I think this is one of those things that also kinda
| demonstrates a lack of faith and trust between the employer
| and employee and can be damaging to the whole relationship.
|
| This has historically always been an issue in many
| workplaces. _Especially_ in jobs were people are
| "interchangeable" and easily replaced and has no leverage,
| because in those kinds of job the threshold before having the
| kind of conversation you related becomes much higher, and the
| incentive for listening lower.
|
| The infamous Triangle Waistcoat Factory fire [1], for
| example, was as lethal as it was because employers locked the
| factory doors to prevent unauthorised breaks.
|
| The worst excesses were stopped because they outright killed
| people and the technological alternatives were not there. But
| increasingly technology is becoming a way of virtually caging
| people instead of actually caging them.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory
| _fi...
| llampx wrote:
| As a new manager, especially with a work culture like you
| describe, it can definitely be easier to go with the flow and
| be an asshole "like everyone else"
|
| If you do things differently, you open yourself up to
| criticism and if anything does go bad, you're likely never
| going to hear the end of it.
|
| Good on you for stopping that vicious circle and being an
| example of a good manager.
| [deleted]
| kgwxd wrote:
| Isn't it trucks being tracked, not the drivers? I don't
| anything about that industry but I can't imagine the drivers
| are made to carry tracking devices.
| type0 wrote:
| It depends, in China drivers are being tracked with face
| recognition cams and they receive warnings if they start to
| slumber. Saw it in some TV documentary so I don't remember
| the sources to this.
| seriousquestion wrote:
| > for instance truck drivers are being tracked routinely and
| nobody makes a big fuss about that
|
| Truck drivers and their families did and still do make a fuss
| about it. It's just not something that the media or wider
| culture has cared about.
| darig wrote:
| I know people that work IT for schneider national trucking...
| they have a antenna on the roof that tracks drivers. It's very
| common for drivers to put a coffee can over it, and blame IT
| that it doesn't work.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| Truck driving is an interesting case because there are laws
| restricting when and how long a driver is allowed to operate,
| and those hours must be logged. At the same time, that logging
| is done on a company-owned device (or, less and less often now,
| a paper log booklet), and only when the employee is using the
| work vehicle.
|
| It's completely unreasonable to expect employees to consent to
| location tracking when they aren't at work. But if the employer
| is requiring use of a smartphone app as condition of
| employment, they need to provide and pay for the device and
| service, period.
| dcanelhas wrote:
| Not that the conditions for the a truck driver are any
| different in terms of privacy (though they might see more of a
| benefit for themselves to deter carjackings or kidnappings) but
| I think that the case for fleet management, logistics and anti-
| theft/smuggling is a bit stronger than for knowing whether a
| person is physically present on premises when cleaning a
| building.
| sharken wrote:
| It seems like a very lazy way for the employer to check if the
| employees are doing their work.
|
| That relationship must build on trust and in this case that trust
| is not there.
|
| Sad that the only way to show you disagree is to quit, the
| workers union should have been able to remove the monitoring
| requirement.
| noxer wrote:
| In a weird twist everyone with a sense of privacy has a windows
| phone. /s
| drewzero1 wrote:
| Several years ago my brother got a windows phone so that he had
| an excuse when people asked him to install apps. It worked very
| well for him and I'm considering replacing my feature phone
| with a PinePhone partially for the same reason.
| kevwil wrote:
| Good for her. My phone, my rules. If a smartphone app is how the
| company wants to operate, that's fine, but they should provide
| the hardware.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| If your employer required this, would _you_ comply?
|
| _[Edited from Would Google and Facebook employees comply]_
| altgoogler wrote:
| Googler here. My opinions are my own.
|
| I would do this if the company provided the hardware and I only
| had to use the device to do work things during work hours. (As
| other pointed out Google does in fact provide hardware to
| employees needing this capability.)
|
| Mandating use on personal hardware is a different story.
| mnw21cam wrote:
| No I wouldn't. But then on this side of the pond I have much
| better protections in law against this sort of thing. That's
| both from a data protection point of view, but also from an
| employment law point of view. I was struck by the part in the
| article where it says:
|
| 'However, Samfiru added, an employer can let an employee go
| "for pretty much any reason" as long as any severance that is
| owed is paid out.'
|
| Over here, if an employer imposes unreasonable conditions on an
| employee, that employee refuses, and the employer fires them
| because of that, then that's unfair dismissal, and the employee
| can take the employer to an employment tribunal. The main
| problem at the tribunal would be proving that the refusal to
| accept the conditions was the reason for dismissal. When I read
| that "her refusal to download the app was mentioned in her
| letter of termination", over here the employee would have the
| employer over a barrel.
|
| It even goes further here. If an employer imposes unreasonable
| conditions, and the employee resigns because of them, that's
| constructive dismissal, and the employee can take the employer
| to the tribunal just like if the employer fired the employee.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| It's a little more reasonable if they're doing it for security
| reasons rather than tracking my productivity.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| No
| foobarian wrote:
| If it's a gig job, the better question is, if Uber required
| this, would you comply? The rest is history...
| unreal37 wrote:
| With Uber, having the company app on your phone is a
| requirement for accepting the job. So complying is not really
| an issue.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| It would depend on my situation. I'm not always in the
| negotiating position I'd like to be in.
|
| If it was the only way to feed my family and house them in a
| safe section of town, then probably yes.
|
| If I was in a less desperate situation, then probably no.
| tjpnz wrote:
| I've never been asked to install any apps (nor would I) but we
| did have the option of giving the company a MAC address for
| automatic clockin when arriving at the office (this was prior
| to Covid - we're mostly all remote now). I would've also
| refused that but I never had anyone pressure me to do it.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| No way, I don't even check work email on my personal device
| vharuck wrote:
| I've been explicitly told not to do this, because it means my
| computer could be taken as evidence in a court case or (as a
| government employee) an open records request.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| You previously asked about Google and Facebook employees.
|
| If you connect your Android phone to your corporate Google
| account, you will be required to install the corp monitoring
| software suite, which (among other things) includes both
| location tracking and nuke-from-orbit features. The company
| does encourage you to configure your phone properly to keep
| your private info in a separate non-corp account to minimize
| undesired data leakage, since the corp side of things is
| assumed to be observable for security and corporate policy
| reasons (I can't remember right now if the nuke-from-orbit
| would wipe the private side of the phone's install also).
|
| You can choose not to do this, though it will probably limit
| your career prospects in the long run (especially if you're SRE
| and need a convenient notification solution for when you're on-
| call). Although, honestly, if one doesn't trust Google's
| handling of private information, one should probably re-think
| one's employment relationship with them.
|
| Anecdotally from my own observation, plenty of employees comply
| because they trust Google's handling of everyone's private
| info, including their own (and that's even given the
| understanding that Google's access to one's "private" info when
| one is working as an employee on corporate tasks can be more
| open... They won't snoop your personal Gmail account, but they
| absolutely reserve the right to investigate your corporate one,
| for example).
| eptcyka wrote:
| Would it not be possible to have 2 phones - a corporate one
| and a personal one?
| Spoom wrote:
| > If you connect your Android phone to your corporate Google
| account, you will be required to install the corp monitoring
| software suite, which (among other things) includes both
| location tracking and nuke-from-orbit features.
|
| My understanding is that on personally-owned Android devices,
| a work profile cannot specifically track location by itself.
| A force-installed app on the work profile could, but you can
| turn off location tracking on the work profile easily[1].
|
| > The company does encourage you to configure your phone
| properly to keep your private info in a separate non-corp
| account to minimize undesired data leakage, since the corp
| side of things is assumed to be observable for security and
| corporate policy reasons (I can't remember right now if the
| nuke-from-orbit would wipe the private side of the phone's
| install also).
|
| On personally-owned Android devices, a remote wipe only wipes
| the work profile. It doesn't touch the personal profile
| side[2].
|
| Googler, opinions my own.
|
| 1. https://support.google.com/work/android/answer/7029265?hl=
| en...
|
| 2. https://support.google.com/work/android/answer/7502354?hl=
| en...
| Yizahi wrote:
| Privacy aside, connecting private Google account to the
| corporate one is sooo extreme move nowadays, for both sides.
| Google may nuke whole account and everything linked to it
| without any way to appeal and reverse it. Then unless you
| happen o have a prominent Twitter account to complain and
| pray for some Google employee to stumble upon your post you
| are out of luck.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Companies this size just give you a company phone.
| silicon2401 wrote:
| > You can choose not to do this, though it will probably
| limit your career prospects in the long run (especially if
| you're SRE and need a convenient notification solution for
| when you're on-call).
|
| If a company wants me to be on-call or do any kind of mobile
| work, they can give me a phone. I let this slide at one job
| because it was a unicorn where I actually loved the job, but
| from then I've been able to get corporate phones and it's
| been key.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Oh, to be clear: Google will absolutely provide you a phone
| if you choose not to do this to your personal device.
|
| ... but if you're SRE oncall, you'll probably have that
| phone on you (or at least within hearing distance) at all
| times when you're on shift. I'd assumed the relevant issue
| was having a tracking device on your person your employer
| can access, not whether the employer was footing the bill
| for the tracking device they encourage you to have on your
| person.
|
| Again anecdotally: most employees I know just set it up on
| their personal device. It's more convenient than carrying
| two devices around when one knows one'll be carrying a
| smartphone anyway.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| I was slightly more alarmed by the "nuke from orbit" than
| the tracking, though they're both troubling enough. Not
| that I'm in much danger of working for Google anyway.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Probably worth noting that given the Cloud nature of
| almost all the Google apps, the opsec model here is that
| the phone is discardable. Your photos are backed up to
| Photos. Your mail is mirrored on Gmail. All your docs are
| in Drive. Your contacts are in Contacts. And so on.
|
| You don't have precious, irretrievable data on that
| device anyway, because it's a phone (as in, "There's
| nothing Google's gonna do to your phone that wouldn't
| happen to it if you dropped it in a toilet, probably
| don't keep the only copy of your baby's first words on
| something that fragile").
| spathi_fwiffo wrote:
| yes. beyond tracking there is also a spy app on your
| phone that can likely access personal data.
|
| So, a separate device would save your from that part, at
| least.
| beforeolives wrote:
| > Edited from Would Google and Facebook employees comply
|
| This seems very unlikely considering that Google and Facebook
| are consistently among some of the best companies in the world
| to work for. There is a big difference between being an
| employee at those companies and being a user of their products.
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| I don't have a personal phone, so I would be unable to comply.
| gav wrote:
| I've worked for a hardware company where our employee badges
| were tracked throughout the building, you had to badge in and
| out to go to the bathroom, which could be tracked I guess.
|
| I didn't really have a problem with it, I feel that this sort
| of non-intrusive tracking is perfectly acceptable when you're
| on the clock.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| It's pretty common around here for firms that don't "face"
| the customers (a software shop is a perfect example) to
| install magnet locks with RFID card readers at the office
| entrance, and give the key cards to the workers (and the
| office building owners, obviously). Throw in some primitive
| software to count timestamps of enters/exits, and here's your
| punch clock for the digital era.
| gpm wrote:
| Are they having you swipe when you exit as well?
| Joker_vD wrote:
| Yes, there is a reader on the inside too.
| elzbardico wrote:
| I quit a job when after hired they wanted me to use hub staff. I
| tried for a while, and it is an incredibly hostile piece of
| software. After some stressful events with it I said: I don't
| need this s*it and asked to leave.
|
| Mind you, I don't care if a company decides to spy on his workers
| using tools like Hubstaff, but they should be upfront about it
| during recruiting so both me and the company don't waste our
| time.
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