Do we just call all of statistics "AI" now? I fail to see how or why applying basic machine learning techniques for data analysis is "artificial intelligence".
This idea that intellection is nothing more than pattern matching is silly and needs to die. Conceptual understanding entails more than just pattern matching.
AI is one of many headline buzzwords these days that get an outsized number of clicks relative to the content, right along with Tesla, Trump, Taylor Swift and probably a few others.
Sentiment analysis may ultimately just be "statistics" but IMHO it goes way beyond what most people consider statistics, which is collecting, organizing, graphing data. Sentiment analysis draws conclusions from the data, assigning things like "level of negativity" and "level of positivity" among other things. It definitely feels like an artificial type of thing that humans do, so artificial intelligence seems like a reasonable category to me.
Historically ML is a sub field within the study of AI. So are a lot of even more mundane techniques. So, if the hit word to describe things is AI, and the shoe fits, wear it!
The AI part is the sentiment analysis of the chat message text and pictures. They're using statistics on the resulting aggregate data. This seems pretty reasonable to me. ML is roughly a gazillion times better than traditional NLP techniques for sentiment analysis. If you're doing sentiment analysis without ML in 2024 then you need to stop and reevaluate what you're doing.
If you simply wanted to complain that they're using "AI" to describe something that uses ML, please tell me so I can move along. Nothing interesting there to discuss.
Do you call all of LLMs “statistics”? I fail to see how anyone who has studied and worked with these systems could fail to see how they exhibit behavior of conceptual understanding.
It's a mandatory buzzword for investment in 2024 since everything else has been milked to death already. I've seen companies go back and slap "AI" on things that have been out for 15 years.
The headline is implying that each individual is being tracked as if for performance reasons, but its a bit different. And is it really that different than the data that companies already keep on individual messaging? The only thing really different from what I can see is that they now have a tool to try and understand the vast amounts of data vs. combing through message logs more manually.
IIR one of a NeurIPS papers (or similar) was a Walmart Labs paper on "Purpose driven AI Guide for Employees" or similar. Multiple mentions of psychological health in the same paper that describes an AI assistant that is hypothetically required for every employee of a certain stripe, that does give instructions and answer questions.
As a skeptic, the one-sided description of mental health, and the obvious parallel to a "always-on slave collar" jumped out. Is there legitimate use for this kind of employment technology?
As is so common, those most incentivized to produce and deploy such a thing, are the exact character that is not to be trusted with such an invasive machine. It just screams of a need to regulate, to my western culture eye.
I work in Tech at Walmart and the funny thing is that of all the places I've worked they do the least in terms of surveying employee satisfaction. If they just asked, I and many of my colleagues would be happy to tell them which people and policies are toxic and which are wonderful. There's broad agreement in the rank and file on much of this. There are some truly awful and some truly wonderful things about the way Walmart manages tech. When I mentioned this to my VP, the response was basically that Walmart top level management didn't want to know some things because they might be compelled to act. Maybe all this "AI" rigamarole is just a way for Walmart top level management to get information without being legally or morally obligated to do anything?
Ok, exactly which communications does this AI monitor? This seems to be internal corporate coms (corporate email, internal chats) which are not subject to privacy. But the article is very unclear, leaving the reader to assume that they are monitoring social media or something else external to the organization.
Internal company communcation channels are open to inspection by the company. Whether that company wants to use AI or pay for agents to read ever internal email is up to them. Want your bosses not to hear you rant about a new corporate policy? Don't sent such comments via company email.
> Depending on where you work, there’s a significant chance that artificial intelligence is analyzing your messages on Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom and other popular apps.
I don't think it's so unclear, and it sounds like you understand too, internal comms. I know it seems obvious, but a lot of people wouldn't even immediately guess. (My first guess before RTA was Slack or anything like Slack. I always think, when I use Slack, that it cannot be truly private unless I start manually encrypting my messages with coworkers.)
I'd guess anything that the business has control over might be a candidate. Even easier if the platform allows for apps to be added on at the company level.
I still call that unclear as many people use Slack and Teams for non-work stuff, or at multiple jobs. The tone of the article leaves a big open door by not directly stating that this is about monitoring employer-controlled channels rather than all slack or teams traffic.
Any kind of communication surveillance that goes beyond monitoring for malware and data exhilaration, especially for monitoring performance, would be completely unthinkable at my (German) employer. The employee council would never ever agree to that.
It‘s not at all obvious that the moral perspective you present as obvious actually is.
Well it‘s not automatic. You need workers/employees to care and take action for this to be something about which I can then say “this would never fly where I work”. And you need the legal framework and cultural norms that support something like that. So not to say it‘s easy.
My point here is that sometimes in theses discussions there seems to be a sort of first principles view of the employee-employer relationship where it is taken as axiomatic that anything you do as an employee (and sometimes even beyond) is for the employer to take and do with whatever they want unconditionally.
My point is that that doesn’t need to be the obviously true axiom it sometimes seems to be.
> Internal company communcation channels are open to inspection by the company.
That is the current rule (at least in some places), but we're conflating the issue of 'is it legal?' with 'is it right?'.
> Whether that company wants to use AI or pay for agents to read ever internal email is up to them.
IMHO this argument needs to be buried once and for all, especially on HN. Automation by computer transforms the power of otherwise manual functions. For example, government could always surveil people on the street, but they had to do it manually. With computers, using cameras and facial recognition, they can automatically track the entire population (theoretically, and later if not now). It's not the same thing as manual surveillance of a suspect.
> Want your bosses not to hear you rant about a new corporate policy? Don't sent such comments via company email.
All that said, I think there are legitimate questions. The mass surveillance enables management to stay ahead of any employee organizing or other political (as in office politics) moves - management knows before the employees themselves realize that lots of people agree with each other. That includes unionization, for example.
Yes, if the company allows it then you can communicate through outside channels, but can you reach the whole company there? That is certainly a hinderance to any mass activity.
There’s also the Goodhart-flavored line of argument here: at the moment, part of the sales pitch is that these internal conversation channels provide a meaningful view into staff’s reactions, dynamics, and states of mind.
Fire the first few folks for their AI-detected “toxicity,” and one imagines the wiser of their “toxic” friends will find other avenues for their bad behavior. Use sentiment analysis to sound out and reward the true believers in the corporate party line, and suddenly everyone will be Slacking effusive praise for the policies of the dear leaders.
The usefulness of this tech would seem to depend a lot on how the place is managed. The obvious worry is that the powers that be will smoke out dissenters, reward toadyism, and punish harmless individual differences. But I can also imagine a constructive management environment, where the “mothership” worries that their feedback from the line staff is getting distorted through layers of management sucking-up and bureaucracy; and imagining this type of analysis as some kind of independent finger on the pulse of the workforce. That seems like it might be useful for making genuinely good decisions.
Knowing a lot of true stuff and using it to rule out bad guesses we made based on false impressions, that doesn’t seem so bad to me.
Using what you know about an underling to punish them, police them, dehumanize them into nothing more than a pile of scores—that’s neither a new strategy nor one that leads to success.
History seems to show that, while that kind of excess may enforce ideological consistency in the near term, it’s intrinsically costly to the health of the [corporation|country|institution]. Over-condition on these signals, like any others, and you just produce a culture of performative compliance and doublespeak-you make the signal useless. And that leaves you in the same anemic information environment that you started in, the sort that tends to conceals problems until they become overwhelming.
> imagine a constructive management environment, where the “mothership” worries
I think this is limited to the realm of imagination. It will never happen.
There is nothing maternal or caring about modern enterprise. Caring is an act of sacrifice-- giving more than you take.
Even charities don't "care," the leaders make bank through arbitrage/exploitation of other people's empathy.
Introspection does not generate revenue. At best it generates goodwill, until the next CEO cashes out on it a decade later and screws everyone anyway.
> part of the sales pitch is that these internal conversation channels provide a meaningful view into staff’s reactions, dynamics, and states of mind.
This really isn't a good thing, at all. It's that social media paradigm where you figure out how to keep the audience maximally-engaged without driving them away. It sounds like a beneficial thing but only ever amounts to assessing "what can I get away with before they mutiny?" It's not a sign of good leadership, it's the playbook of a carnival worker.
I do internal investigations. Half of me wishes we had this visibility for obvious reason. The other half dreads the implications of actually having it.
> Ok, exactly which communications does this AI monitor? This seems to be internal corporate coms (corporate email, internal chats) which are not subject to privacy
Expectation of privacy doesn't mean automation of surveillance is reasonable or acceptable. If you're out in public, there is no expectation of privacy, and I (a human) may take a picture of you without breaking any social contract. If someone sets up thousands of facial-recognition cameras in public space you use, that changes the calculus by a lot, despite no change in the underlying lack of expectation of privacy. Quantity has a quality of its own.
As much as this turns my stomach, this is neither new nor unexpected, and honestly this is fairly benign to many of the things that companies do such as precision location tracking throughout the building, using company-issued phones, and using normal security surveillance to monitor "watercooler" talk and things like that.
We had our chance to push back against company surveillance well over a decade ago, and nobody except privacy advocates like me seemed to give a shit. Some very close friends actually told (after the company for "saftey reasons" started using RFID tracking to track our movements throughout the building using our ID cards) that I was being "paranoid" by suggesting that at some point it would be openly surveiling employee activities like bathroom breaks, watercooler conversation, etc.
Please don't misunderstand, I'm not saying that it's too late, that we've lost, and that we get what we deserve (although such might be true), but I am pessimistic that we could ever reverse this at this late stage point. The cancer has long metastasized and buried itself deeply into every nook and cranny.
I don't know if it will work, but this is what I think we should do:
1. Refuse to work at companies that do the most invasive surveillance. This means a lot more of your options are gonna be to work for yourself or for a startup.
2. Spread the word in conversations and stuff (when appropriate. Don't be obnoxious and shove people's face in it cause that won't serve any purpose except alienating them). Seek to educate and inform, not to evangelize or argue (though such things do have their place, but use discretion).
3. Shame the companies who do surveillance. I'm not saying be obnoxious or in-your-face about it because that won't do anything other than make you an asshole, but it's absolutely worth bringing it up in a reasonable, fact-based way when appropriate. I've told recruiters that I won't work for <big tech co> because of this.
4. Live your values and try not to do business with these companies, though such can be hard when many have near-monopoly status or a hard-to-avoid position. A full boycott is admirable, but you gotta live your life too. Just try to continually re-evaluate alternatives and vote with your $.
Anticipating someone dismissing me as an "r/antiwork" person (yes, people on the internet and even Hacker News do routinely make ridiculous assumptions about people based on zero knowledge other than one comment they just read), I actually think ignoring this helps the antiwork people by giving them valid points about the abuse. If you don't think they're right, then you should be very much on my side here because if nothing happens, they will eventually be right.
What could anyone do about it? Workers rights have never been won without a militant organized labor force. "Advocate" for your pet interests all you want, but you aren't accomplishing anything for anyone else unless you're organizing, and "privacy" is frankly a terrible cause to organize around and you seem to already realize that. Focus on wages, time off, and improving peoples everyday working conditions, and you will eventually get your chance to address privacy. That's just the reality of the exploitative system we live under.
Thanks, your comment is interesting. Just want to clarify on something as we might have different definitions/understanding.
> Workers rights have never been won without a militant organized labor force.
Just in the past few years, many companies have started giving generous paternal/maternal leave policies. Which militant organization brought that change about? Or would you not consider that to be workers rights? If the latter, can you give me some examples of what you consider to be workers rights so we can be on the same page?
>Just in the past few years, many companies have started giving generous paternal/maternal leave policies.
Try passing these paternity leave policies as a law and see which side those companies are on then. You will quickly get a taste of reality. Capital loves to perform generosity when they retain the power to stop at a moment's notice and lay everybody off with no cause.
The 40 hour work week was won with nothing less than years of backbreaking struggle and 4 innocent lives lost at the hands of the mitary assigned to break the strike.
US workers have not won any universal workers rights in living memory. The decimation of labor unions and the CIO in the McCarthy era put an abrupt end to that.
> Try passing these paternity leave policies as a law
These policies have been the law for many years in the United States, both at the federal level and (additionally and seperately) at the state level in nearly all states:
5. Make friends with all the sys admins. Thats the simplest way to bypass whatever bullshit corporate robots dream up. Like Jurassic Park they love to believe they control everything thats going on in the park. In reality their control rooms are full of Dennis Nedrys.
Because sys admins are going to risk their jobs and expose themselves to possible civil claims for damages or even criminal charges by intentionally circumventing company policy for their friends? A few might, I guess. I wouldn't , nor would any that I know.
A better 5. is probably lobby your lawmakers for stronger workplace privacy laws.
This has been my experience. Excepting maybe small startups, gone are the days also where a sysadmin could do something and nobody would know. These days things are heavily logged and audited, usually by software. With IaC and peer review, there's no way one person could do something without numerous others knowing.
I'll add one. (Not just talking about the immediate employee surveillance tech, but various questionable tech we develop and use, and slippery slopes going forward)
5. Consider the development or use of evil tech to reflect poorly upon the people involved. Like in an interview: "I see you were a developer at Dystopitools..." or "I see you were a manager at Megajerco..."
"I wasn't in the evildoing department" might be an acceptable explanation.
"I was just following orders" seems less likely to be an acceptable explanation.
Asking for an explanation might be reasonable, depending on the nature of the evildoing.
One benefit I imagine of knowing that we'll have to explain ourselves for associating with evil tech is that individuals will even consider that evil tech is a problem. Otherwise, if all people talk about is total comp, tech stacks, and how we spend the gobs of money we get paid, it's easy to forget the inconvenient aspects we don't talk about, like if we're getting paid to do evil.
Of course, sometimes people have no choice. But other times we rationalize, "Sure, I'm actively helping my employer make the world worse, but I have to put food on my family", when there are less-evil alternatives that also pay enough.
(Precedent: I've previously heard multiple executives say they don't want to hire people from particular prestigious tech companies, because, in so many words, they assume that the person learned bad culture at the company, or something is wrong with them for going there in the first place. Adapting that idea to evil tech development and application, and softening it from denylist to being asked to explain, seems worth considering.)
Start stigmatizing evils before a particular kind of evil is so ubiquitous that there are no alternatives.
I’d consider salaries and such too. It seems reasonably likely that someone making $200,000 has many options for work and is choosing money over morals.
Someone making $70,000 or on an H1B may not have other options in this field, may face hundreds of applications before getting another interview.
May I ask why privacy matters at work? Not trying to be a dick. But shouldn’t people at work be doing only the things they’re paid for on company time?
Even at work, most people like to believe they are trusted to do what they've said they are going to do without needing to be constantly monitored and micromanaged. Anything else is unsettling and oppressive.
I would refuse to work at a company that expected me to give up my privacy during working hours.
I understand the argument to be made for monitoring employees as they move throughout the work site. If there is a building fire, then security can validate that I've made it out safely and they don't need to spend resources trying to find me in the building. I don't find this oppressive. I'm not even sure what I'm giving up for having my physical presence monitored at a work building.
I also agree that privacy matters, and I'll advocate for it. But, I frequently struggle to express why it matters.
Privacy matters at work because the interests of the employee and the employer are in tension. Do you expect an employee to leave every personal item out of work? Should employees expect to not speak of their personal lives, or to have artifacts of their personal life leak into the workplace? To say that the boundary should be absolute is hopelessly naive. Privacy matters because it is a leaky barrier, and the employer should not be capable of retaining personal information they can use to emotionally extort or legally strong-arm their employee when it's useful for them.
I kind of do expect expect to leave their private matters at home. Or the very least, to handle them during break time on their own phones. This does not seem at all oppressive to me.
And in the ideal world, that's fine, but again- hopelessly naive in the real world. Taken to the extreme, why should we not record all audio? And if someone receives an urgent phone call from home, something extremely personal, should that stay in the company's records? No, for fear that the company will use their power disparity to exert undue control over the employee's life from them attending to the actually important matters in their life. That's why privacy matters.
Your problem is not management, it's you (if this comment represents you) and your kind. The comment is lazy and just following an absurd fashion: wallowing in despair. Your advice is useless unless people organize and act. You need to do better; we need to do better. Though management could not ask for a 'better' worker, a better agent even (I don't think you are, but you might as well be).
People facing far more difficult odds have organized and won. Think of all the things our ancestors have overcome to build the world we live in, and what do we contribute? 'It's too hard'? 'I'm pessimistic'? No matter what we were working on, I'd eject you as soon as possible.
I agree in spirit, but their pessimism is borne from sounding the alarm early and still failing to avert a trainwreck. It's understandably demoralizing.
They did offer a list of possible solutions despite that. They're trying.
> their pessimism is borne from sounding the alarm early and still failing to avert a trainwreck. It's understandably demoralizing.
Welcome to life, to challenge, to hardship, to what everyone who has ever accomplished anything has faced - many faced far worse. What is different is their attitude, which I expect was subtly taught by their opposition - quit. That's for losers - sorry, but it's true. And it spreads that poison to everyone else. Fire that person pronto.
Look at Washington in Valley Forge, Dr. King in a Birmingham jail, Churchill under seige by the Nazis, etc etc etc. Remind me what this guy is complaining about again?
The only attitude that ever has accomplished anything is, 'nothing will stop me'. To get up again when you've been smashed in the teeth - again and again and again - what you do after that is all that matters. It's also to show absolute courage to people around you - grace under pressure.
You know this; you've forgotten; you've had a bad dream. Wake up.
>>>> Using the anonymized data in Aware’s analytics product, clients can see how employees of a certain age group or in a particular geography are responding to a new corporate policy or marketing campaign
>>>> “It won’t have names of people, to protect the privacy,” Schumann said. Rather, he said, clients will see that “maybe the workforce over the age of 40 in this part of the United States is seeing the changes to [a] policy very negatively because of the cost, but everybody else outside of that age group and location sees it positively because it impacts them in a different way.”
QFT. It's always the over-40 who are under suspicion.
If that's the intention everyone who uses this software opens themselves up to age discrimination lawsuits (40 years of age is the cutoff). This is either a really dumb way to market a product or it's actually meant to detect those discriminatory policies so employers can undo them before someone decides to sue.
I think you're assuming the software would be used to punish people who don't like the policies...but what if it's just used to help accommodate groups who don't like the policies?
No, this is the "safe" way to discriminate without explicitly saying "we don't like you."
Case in point, look at Atlanta. Mandatory drug testing is still a thing, and they're averse to hiring anybody with a criminal conviction. If you really want to be nasty, you set up office far away from the nearest MARTA line. Altogether, you'll get very few minority applicants.
What discriminatory practice would you sue over? They drug test everyone, turn away all convicts, and you can't compel a company to be accessible by public transit.
So in the quote, gee, this policy being "really unpopular with those over 40" is how you drive them out. Being very intolerant of family/outside emergencies is another way.
Reality: 50% of the workers never opened the e-mail. For the other half, average reading time was under 5 seconds. 40% of those who interacted with the e-mail deleted it. Two people "accidentally" reported it as junk mail.
I’d bet serious money on yes. Amazon and Starbucks are incredibly anti-union. Unions scare them—unions mean shareholders and execs would be forced to share more profits with their workers. (The horror!)
Just one example: Even though workers have won unions at Amazon and Starbucks shops, the companies are plain refusing to negotiate contracts with them as is right.
This, the Gem AI revelation from last week; a bunch of companies are going to get clobbered by the massive fines. The question is if the fines will ever be worse than the benefit of the misdeed. Probably not.
If Delta's "AI" support they force you through (even as Diamond Medallion) before you can chat with a representative is an indication of their competency, this monitoring is doomed.
The real value if removing encryption is access for AI.
If we don’t have a comprehensive privacy legislation, something like a bill of rights for privacy, tied to individuals, AI will become a tool of totalitarianism and total information thought control. Full stop.
You can look at it though todays lens and argue this is just another application of machine learning, but it isn’t just a slippery slope but becomes a landslide as soon as you apply more sophisticated future digital intelligences to it.
People often underestimate the effects of losing privacy. A lot of comments here seem to reflect the idea that “If I’m employed by CompanyY then I’m owned by them.” We are spending a majority of our waking hours working, often, and being trained to believe that an authority’s ownership of technical systems means that not only everything we do with other people via those systems belongs to an employer, but that our inadvertent inclusion of ourselves as humans and not simply task performers is “our own fault.” As humans, our psychological wellbeing rests on a sense of autonomy and these systems directly suppress that.
If these same businesses all decided they were going to take your first born as collateral, I suspect a lot of CEOs and chairmen would be swinging from lamp posts (as they should) within a week.
Personally, I would do far worse to such scumbags -- things that are not only (somehow) illegal to describe, but would likely get plenty of downvotes by the most milquetoast and pathetic. Things that up until the last 100 years, would have been regarded as normal for the entirety of recorded human history.
It's an Overton Window. Business executives and their big investors are the feudal overlords who are decreasingly benevolent liege lords.
What is abhorrent now slowly becomes normalized. Look at CEOs who said, shortly after some of the more brutal start opining about how everyone needs to RTO or GTFO At least one of those CEOs said they needed a bit more Elon in them. They meant his ruthlessness with his employees.
> Sure. Now. > > It's an Overton Window. Business executives and their big investors are the feudal overlords who are decreasingly benevolent liege lords. > > What is abhorrent now slowly becomes normalized. Look at CEOs who said, shortly after some of the more brutal start opining about how everyone needs to RTO or GTFO At least one of those CEOs said they needed a bit more Elon in them. They meant his ruthlessness with his employees. > > And the window moves.
So what he's saying is that he got together with 130+ other CEOs, who combined will probably make millions if not billions, bitching that the people who do the actual grunt work (and make a couple of thousand a month) aren't putting in extra hours or looking at their work mail on weekends.
This is so far from reality it's staggering. I work with, and among young developers every day. I'm in my forties and I've done so for most of ny career. Beyond a healthy work life balance they are just sick of working without a fair share of the benefits.
These people aren't less prone to work hard, they just don't want to work hard to make extremely wealthy people more wealthy.
Some are working less for their employer, and in the meantime are working for themselves to create new disruptive startups.
The article says CEOs are "worried", but it also states that these workers should fear for their jobs because they are going to be made obsolete by AI.
The reality is that small companies can get much more work done in less time than big ones, I have worked for both.
The bigger a company gets, the slower it becomes.
I blame a lot of it on the mass adoption of stock-based investment and retirement plans.
With defined-benefit pensions and even traditional bond-based investments, the narrative is "The company has an obligation to me for very specific deliverables, even if that means reduced investor return." There's an appropriately adversarial relationship there, which keeps everyone behaving better.
With stock investments, people conclude "my personal success- even survival- is inextricably linked with how good the company looks to Wall Street." This incentivizes sycophantism.
I think that's a very tech-centric (and specifically FAANG-centric) mindset, most people are not getting RSOs or options and aren't under any impression their fate is entwined with the stock price.
on the other hand you are right that the idea of corporations as independent, self-directed profit-seeking entities with no other social responsibilities or responsibilities to their employees etc has finally subsumed us totally. Corporations are living entities, they are are social organisms. Just like a single bee is not (itself) a living organism (cannot reproduce or shelter itself, etc), but rather the bee colony is the life-form there. Corporations are living systems of rules and incentives - memeplexes.
Paperclip maximizers already exist, and the outcome we have given them is "stock price goes up". Until something is changed about allowing the existence of unrestrained paperclip maximizers, they will continue to maximize and do their best to eat society and turn it into paperclips.
I don't know what you and others are on about. Work systems have no expectation of privacy. Just how it is.
If there was a law where certain types of communication had expectation of privacy, similar to how toilets at work have an expectation of privacy, that'd be nice. Some countries like Germany do have this, it's not always a good thing but if that's what you want then have your state's lawmakers pass that law.
I worked in environments where hot mic's and cameras are being used to monitor what we say and do in addition to screen recording, chat monitoring (slack,teams,etc... all have a feature), browser monitoring,etc... and that's just the tip of the ice berg, the layers of shady shit they do, because in their messed up heads employee and slave are not all that different, is endless. Is it illegal? That's the wrong question, the right question is obviously most people don't want any of this because it is against their advantage, but can the government which derives it's power and authority from most people represent them and legislate to begin with? The answer is no it cannot.
Can my employer record conversations and video using my work laptop in my home, I mean just petty managers not even for a legitimate inquiry? Yes, they can get away with that. Why is there no law to govern this? Because legislation does not follow the will of the people, it follows the will of fund raisers.
Companies are people too but with bigger political contributions. "For the people, by the people, of the people", people in that context now means mostly corporate persons and their interest trumps the individuals'.
> Can my employer record conversations and video using my work laptop in my home, I mean just petty managers not even for a legitimate inquiry? Yes, they can get away with that.
Also using your work cellphone? Which country is this? Any experts on law have an opinion on this?
US PATRIOT Act essentially normalized domestic spying with FISA courts rubber stamping warrants in the name of “war on terror”. Privacy advocates lost once those towers fell on 2001-09-11.
Millennials pushed the aging fossils into the digital world (e-banking/mobile banking, almost everything is digitalized today). Social media changed the way we interact with people. The concept of privacy continues to erode.
Gen Z and future generations continuing the trend. Often just giving away their information for likes/impressions/views. Everything has been recorded in one way or another. Relationships also built on “no privacy” (couples often know their phone passcodes …). Children raised in dystopian households where privacy does not exist (parents have access to everything). Future generations conditioned to obey.
Now it’s bleeding from private life into the work with invasive AI models deployed to determine seditious activity as deemed by Karen in HR or Jeff from C-level exec suite because he gets a nice kickback (via speaker fees) after getting approached by AI company.
Next level is totalitarian, surveillance state monitoring as depicted in 1984. Skip the middleman (private companies vacuuming up all the data and selling to govt).
>Skip the middleman (private companies vacuuming up all the data and selling to govt).
Why skip it? Keep it and enlarge it. Then you get to have your cake (total surveilance) and eat it too (it's not the government doing it! we're just buying those private sector data).
Same way you can censor as a government and still be all about "free speech"! You just let the private sector do the censoring - with a little carrot and stick encouragement from you, they know what they have to do and will even jump at the chance without you having to explicitly ask them.
You're making it sound like there's some kind of plan behind it. There is no conspiracy. There won't be a direct "skip the middleman" totalitarian level, because governments are too busy chasing their own tails and smelling the farts in a 4-year election cycle to consider anything of a broader scope. Meanwhile, private companies are chasing easy money at the expense of anything that's good, honest or nice, like they always do.
We walked into this situation through decades of individual selfishness, aggregated.
This is why I believe that it will be a corporate-ocracy, as the corporation has a much longer lifespan than some political short-term influence. However corporations can also 'fly too close to the flame' in the political sphere. Whoever comes out on top will be the product of their own political ideology and not the red-vs-blue politics.
The concept of the public space is also eroding and it is overshadowed on these forums by privacy advocates.
Privacy is indeed important but only up to the limit that it intrudes upon the public accountability necessary for a republic to function.
We seem fine with letting governments and large corporations know where we live and how much we pay in taxes yet are hesitant to make this information public due to fear of our fellow citizens. That is a complete erosion of social trust and cohesion.
Someone please put a science-fiction sheen on the death of the public sphere. There is more than the dominant 1984-inspired narratives at play!
Corporate workplace spying on employee communication became prevalent in the 90s to prevent discrimination lawsuits. This predates what we think of as our contemporary "surveilance capitalism". There were a series of court decisions that enshrined this practice in law and since then the limits of proscribed speech have expanded.
I can only speak to one of the mentioned companies as I worked in this vertical, this has been happening for years across every communication platform. Companies like Symantec, ForcePoint and ProofPoint offer these features out of the box. Setting up rules is as easy as creating a list of keywords or phrases. It is all done under the guise of “treat protection,” meaning if you send a message on teams saying “I’m about to kill this presentation” know a analyst is going look through everything you’ve done in the last 3 months. This includes file movement, internet history, sent messages, emails, screen recordings, and lots of other things. IMO these products are legal corporate malware. In my experience they are mostly used to track people who are about to be laid off.
A notion submitted for consideration: "Privacy concerns happen when people get abruptly reminded of a power-imbalance they previously tolerated or ignored."
It seems like over the past several years the words "risk" and "harm" have been redefined to mean almost anything. Am I crazy? If not, what's driving this?
103 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] threadThis idea that intellection is nothing more than pattern matching is silly and needs to die. Conceptual understanding entails more than just pattern matching.
Sentiment analysis may ultimately just be "statistics" but IMHO it goes way beyond what most people consider statistics, which is collecting, organizing, graphing data. Sentiment analysis draws conclusions from the data, assigning things like "level of negativity" and "level of positivity" among other things. It definitely feels like an artificial type of thing that humans do, so artificial intelligence seems like a reasonable category to me.
If you simply wanted to complain that they're using "AI" to describe something that uses ML, please tell me so I can move along. Nothing interesting there to discuss.
As a skeptic, the one-sided description of mental health, and the obvious parallel to a "always-on slave collar" jumped out. Is there legitimate use for this kind of employment technology?
As is so common, those most incentivized to produce and deploy such a thing, are the exact character that is not to be trusted with such an invasive machine. It just screams of a need to regulate, to my western culture eye.
Internal company communcation channels are open to inspection by the company. Whether that company wants to use AI or pay for agents to read ever internal email is up to them. Want your bosses not to hear you rant about a new corporate policy? Don't sent such comments via company email.
I don't think it's so unclear, and it sounds like you understand too, internal comms. I know it seems obvious, but a lot of people wouldn't even immediately guess. (My first guess before RTA was Slack or anything like Slack. I always think, when I use Slack, that it cannot be truly private unless I start manually encrypting my messages with coworkers.)
I'd guess anything that the business has control over might be a candidate. Even easier if the platform allows for apps to be added on at the company level.
If that's acceptable where does this fit in your worldview
It‘s not at all obvious that the moral perspective you present as obvious actually is.
My point here is that sometimes in theses discussions there seems to be a sort of first principles view of the employee-employer relationship where it is taken as axiomatic that anything you do as an employee (and sometimes even beyond) is for the employer to take and do with whatever they want unconditionally.
My point is that that doesn’t need to be the obviously true axiom it sometimes seems to be.
That is the current rule (at least in some places), but we're conflating the issue of 'is it legal?' with 'is it right?'.
> Whether that company wants to use AI or pay for agents to read ever internal email is up to them.
IMHO this argument needs to be buried once and for all, especially on HN. Automation by computer transforms the power of otherwise manual functions. For example, government could always surveil people on the street, but they had to do it manually. With computers, using cameras and facial recognition, they can automatically track the entire population (theoretically, and later if not now). It's not the same thing as manual surveillance of a suspect.
> Want your bosses not to hear you rant about a new corporate policy? Don't sent such comments via company email.
All that said, I think there are legitimate questions. The mass surveillance enables management to stay ahead of any employee organizing or other political (as in office politics) moves - management knows before the employees themselves realize that lots of people agree with each other. That includes unionization, for example.
Yes, if the company allows it then you can communicate through outside channels, but can you reach the whole company there? That is certainly a hinderance to any mass activity.
Fire the first few folks for their AI-detected “toxicity,” and one imagines the wiser of their “toxic” friends will find other avenues for their bad behavior. Use sentiment analysis to sound out and reward the true believers in the corporate party line, and suddenly everyone will be Slacking effusive praise for the policies of the dear leaders.
The usefulness of this tech would seem to depend a lot on how the place is managed. The obvious worry is that the powers that be will smoke out dissenters, reward toadyism, and punish harmless individual differences. But I can also imagine a constructive management environment, where the “mothership” worries that their feedback from the line staff is getting distorted through layers of management sucking-up and bureaucracy; and imagining this type of analysis as some kind of independent finger on the pulse of the workforce. That seems like it might be useful for making genuinely good decisions.
Knowing a lot of true stuff and using it to rule out bad guesses we made based on false impressions, that doesn’t seem so bad to me.
Using what you know about an underling to punish them, police them, dehumanize them into nothing more than a pile of scores—that’s neither a new strategy nor one that leads to success.
History seems to show that, while that kind of excess may enforce ideological consistency in the near term, it’s intrinsically costly to the health of the [corporation|country|institution]. Over-condition on these signals, like any others, and you just produce a culture of performative compliance and doublespeak-you make the signal useless. And that leaves you in the same anemic information environment that you started in, the sort that tends to conceals problems until they become overwhelming.
I think this is limited to the realm of imagination. It will never happen.
There is nothing maternal or caring about modern enterprise. Caring is an act of sacrifice-- giving more than you take.
Even charities don't "care," the leaders make bank through arbitrage/exploitation of other people's empathy.
Introspection does not generate revenue. At best it generates goodwill, until the next CEO cashes out on it a decade later and screws everyone anyway.
> part of the sales pitch is that these internal conversation channels provide a meaningful view into staff’s reactions, dynamics, and states of mind.
This really isn't a good thing, at all. It's that social media paradigm where you figure out how to keep the audience maximally-engaged without driving them away. It sounds like a beneficial thing but only ever amounts to assessing "what can I get away with before they mutiny?" It's not a sign of good leadership, it's the playbook of a carnival worker.
I do internal investigations. Half of me wishes we had this visibility for obvious reason. The other half dreads the implications of actually having it.
Expectation of privacy doesn't mean automation of surveillance is reasonable or acceptable. If you're out in public, there is no expectation of privacy, and I (a human) may take a picture of you without breaking any social contract. If someone sets up thousands of facial-recognition cameras in public space you use, that changes the calculus by a lot, despite no change in the underlying lack of expectation of privacy. Quantity has a quality of its own.
We had our chance to push back against company surveillance well over a decade ago, and nobody except privacy advocates like me seemed to give a shit. Some very close friends actually told (after the company for "saftey reasons" started using RFID tracking to track our movements throughout the building using our ID cards) that I was being "paranoid" by suggesting that at some point it would be openly surveiling employee activities like bathroom breaks, watercooler conversation, etc.
Please don't misunderstand, I'm not saying that it's too late, that we've lost, and that we get what we deserve (although such might be true), but I am pessimistic that we could ever reverse this at this late stage point. The cancer has long metastasized and buried itself deeply into every nook and cranny.
I don't know if it will work, but this is what I think we should do:
1. Refuse to work at companies that do the most invasive surveillance. This means a lot more of your options are gonna be to work for yourself or for a startup.
2. Spread the word in conversations and stuff (when appropriate. Don't be obnoxious and shove people's face in it cause that won't serve any purpose except alienating them). Seek to educate and inform, not to evangelize or argue (though such things do have their place, but use discretion).
3. Shame the companies who do surveillance. I'm not saying be obnoxious or in-your-face about it because that won't do anything other than make you an asshole, but it's absolutely worth bringing it up in a reasonable, fact-based way when appropriate. I've told recruiters that I won't work for <big tech co> because of this.
4. Live your values and try not to do business with these companies, though such can be hard when many have near-monopoly status or a hard-to-avoid position. A full boycott is admirable, but you gotta live your life too. Just try to continually re-evaluate alternatives and vote with your $.
Anticipating someone dismissing me as an "r/antiwork" person (yes, people on the internet and even Hacker News do routinely make ridiculous assumptions about people based on zero knowledge other than one comment they just read), I actually think ignoring this helps the antiwork people by giving them valid points about the abuse. If you don't think they're right, then you should be very much on my side here because if nothing happens, they will eventually be right.
> Workers rights have never been won without a militant organized labor force.
Just in the past few years, many companies have started giving generous paternal/maternal leave policies. Which militant organization brought that change about? Or would you not consider that to be workers rights? If the latter, can you give me some examples of what you consider to be workers rights so we can be on the same page?
Try passing these paternity leave policies as a law and see which side those companies are on then. You will quickly get a taste of reality. Capital loves to perform generosity when they retain the power to stop at a moment's notice and lay everybody off with no cause.
The 40 hour work week was won with nothing less than years of backbreaking struggle and 4 innocent lives lost at the hands of the mitary assigned to break the strike.
US workers have not won any universal workers rights in living memory. The decimation of labor unions and the CIO in the McCarthy era put an abrupt end to that.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_Strike
These policies have been the law for many years in the United States, both at the federal level and (additionally and seperately) at the state level in nearly all states:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave_in_the_United_S...
A better 5. is probably lobby your lawmakers for stronger workplace privacy laws.
5. Consider the development or use of evil tech to reflect poorly upon the people involved. Like in an interview: "I see you were a developer at Dystopitools..." or "I see you were a manager at Megajerco..."
"I wasn't in the evildoing department" might be an acceptable explanation.
"I was just following orders" seems less likely to be an acceptable explanation.
Asking for an explanation might be reasonable, depending on the nature of the evildoing.
One benefit I imagine of knowing that we'll have to explain ourselves for associating with evil tech is that individuals will even consider that evil tech is a problem. Otherwise, if all people talk about is total comp, tech stacks, and how we spend the gobs of money we get paid, it's easy to forget the inconvenient aspects we don't talk about, like if we're getting paid to do evil.
Of course, sometimes people have no choice. But other times we rationalize, "Sure, I'm actively helping my employer make the world worse, but I have to put food on my family", when there are less-evil alternatives that also pay enough.
(Precedent: I've previously heard multiple executives say they don't want to hire people from particular prestigious tech companies, because, in so many words, they assume that the person learned bad culture at the company, or something is wrong with them for going there in the first place. Adapting that idea to evil tech development and application, and softening it from denylist to being asked to explain, seems worth considering.)
Start stigmatizing evils before a particular kind of evil is so ubiquitous that there are no alternatives.
Someone making $70,000 or on an H1B may not have other options in this field, may face hundreds of applications before getting another interview.
Even at work, most people like to believe they are trusted to do what they've said they are going to do without needing to be constantly monitored and micromanaged. Anything else is unsettling and oppressive.
I would refuse to work at a company that expected me to give up my privacy during working hours.
Sure, but it doesn't really answer the question.
> Anything else is unsettling and oppressive.
I understand the argument to be made for monitoring employees as they move throughout the work site. If there is a building fire, then security can validate that I've made it out safely and they don't need to spend resources trying to find me in the building. I don't find this oppressive. I'm not even sure what I'm giving up for having my physical presence monitored at a work building.
I also agree that privacy matters, and I'll advocate for it. But, I frequently struggle to express why it matters.
Your problem is not management, it's you (if this comment represents you) and your kind. The comment is lazy and just following an absurd fashion: wallowing in despair. Your advice is useless unless people organize and act. You need to do better; we need to do better. Though management could not ask for a 'better' worker, a better agent even (I don't think you are, but you might as well be).
People facing far more difficult odds have organized and won. Think of all the things our ancestors have overcome to build the world we live in, and what do we contribute? 'It's too hard'? 'I'm pessimistic'? No matter what we were working on, I'd eject you as soon as possible.
They did offer a list of possible solutions despite that. They're trying.
Welcome to life, to challenge, to hardship, to what everyone who has ever accomplished anything has faced - many faced far worse. What is different is their attitude, which I expect was subtly taught by their opposition - quit. That's for losers - sorry, but it's true. And it spreads that poison to everyone else. Fire that person pronto.
Look at Washington in Valley Forge, Dr. King in a Birmingham jail, Churchill under seige by the Nazis, etc etc etc. Remind me what this guy is complaining about again?
The only attitude that ever has accomplished anything is, 'nothing will stop me'. To get up again when you've been smashed in the teeth - again and again and again - what you do after that is all that matters. It's also to show absolute courage to people around you - grace under pressure.
You know this; you've forgotten; you've had a bad dream. Wake up.
>>>> “It won’t have names of people, to protect the privacy,” Schumann said. Rather, he said, clients will see that “maybe the workforce over the age of 40 in this part of the United States is seeing the changes to [a] policy very negatively because of the cost, but everybody else outside of that age group and location sees it positively because it impacts them in a different way.”
QFT. It's always the over-40 who are under suspicion.
Disclosure: Old.
Because of our (over 40s) years of watching bad policy after bad policy destroying our work places, and speaking up.
It will not be used for anything but control and punishment.
Case in point, look at Atlanta. Mandatory drug testing is still a thing, and they're averse to hiring anybody with a criminal conviction. If you really want to be nasty, you set up office far away from the nearest MARTA line. Altogether, you'll get very few minority applicants.
What discriminatory practice would you sue over? They drug test everyone, turn away all convicts, and you can't compel a company to be accessible by public transit.
So in the quote, gee, this policy being "really unpopular with those over 40" is how you drive them out. Being very intolerant of family/outside emergencies is another way.
It’s certainly not Gen Z kids in leadership positions implementing these AI snooping policies at these mega corporations.
Reality: 50% of the workers never opened the e-mail. For the other half, average reading time was under 5 seconds. 40% of those who interacted with the e-mail deleted it. Two people "accidentally" reported it as junk mail.
“There’s a class warfare and mine is winning” WB
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/business/yourmoney/26ever...
Just one example: Even though workers have won unions at Amazon and Starbucks shops, the companies are plain refusing to negotiate contracts with them as is right.
If we don’t have a comprehensive privacy legislation, something like a bill of rights for privacy, tied to individuals, AI will become a tool of totalitarianism and total information thought control. Full stop.
You can look at it though todays lens and argue this is just another application of machine learning, but it isn’t just a slippery slope but becomes a landslide as soon as you apply more sophisticated future digital intelligences to it.
That's corporate speak for "we will analyze your data by all other available means" and AI is the perfect tool for that.
They want our whole selves. They want every drop of what they can get out of us.
This is so often what they mean when they say that they want people who are "passionate" about the work. They want us obsessed and fixated.
So they want to more than own us.
This isn't all businesses but increasingly this is becoming normalized.
If these same businesses all decided they were going to take your first born as collateral, I suspect a lot of CEOs and chairmen would be swinging from lamp posts (as they should) within a week.
Personally, I would do far worse to such scumbags -- things that are not only (somehow) illegal to describe, but would likely get plenty of downvotes by the most milquetoast and pathetic. Things that up until the last 100 years, would have been regarded as normal for the entirety of recorded human history.
It's an Overton Window. Business executives and their big investors are the feudal overlords who are decreasingly benevolent liege lords.
What is abhorrent now slowly becomes normalized. Look at CEOs who said, shortly after some of the more brutal start opining about how everyone needs to RTO or GTFO At least one of those CEOs said they needed a bit more Elon in them. They meant his ruthlessness with his employees.
And the window moves.
Exactly. I was browsing LinkedIn this week when I stumbled in this gem: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/samfjacobs_last-month-i-was-a...
So what he's saying is that he got together with 130+ other CEOs, who combined will probably make millions if not billions, bitching that the people who do the actual grunt work (and make a couple of thousand a month) aren't putting in extra hours or looking at their work mail on weekends.
This is so far from reality it's staggering. I work with, and among young developers every day. I'm in my forties and I've done so for most of ny career. Beyond a healthy work life balance they are just sick of working without a fair share of the benefits.
These people aren't less prone to work hard, they just don't want to work hard to make extremely wealthy people more wealthy.
Some are working less for their employer, and in the meantime are working for themselves to create new disruptive startups.
The article says CEOs are "worried", but it also states that these workers should fear for their jobs because they are going to be made obsolete by AI.
The reality is that small companies can get much more work done in less time than big ones, I have worked for both. The bigger a company gets, the slower it becomes.
With defined-benefit pensions and even traditional bond-based investments, the narrative is "The company has an obligation to me for very specific deliverables, even if that means reduced investor return." There's an appropriately adversarial relationship there, which keeps everyone behaving better.
With stock investments, people conclude "my personal success- even survival- is inextricably linked with how good the company looks to Wall Street." This incentivizes sycophantism.
on the other hand you are right that the idea of corporations as independent, self-directed profit-seeking entities with no other social responsibilities or responsibilities to their employees etc has finally subsumed us totally. Corporations are living entities, they are are social organisms. Just like a single bee is not (itself) a living organism (cannot reproduce or shelter itself, etc), but rather the bee colony is the life-form there. Corporations are living systems of rules and incentives - memeplexes.
Paperclip maximizers already exist, and the outcome we have given them is "stock price goes up". Until something is changed about allowing the existence of unrestrained paperclip maximizers, they will continue to maximize and do their best to eat society and turn it into paperclips.
If there was a law where certain types of communication had expectation of privacy, similar to how toilets at work have an expectation of privacy, that'd be nice. Some countries like Germany do have this, it's not always a good thing but if that's what you want then have your state's lawmakers pass that law.
I worked in environments where hot mic's and cameras are being used to monitor what we say and do in addition to screen recording, chat monitoring (slack,teams,etc... all have a feature), browser monitoring,etc... and that's just the tip of the ice berg, the layers of shady shit they do, because in their messed up heads employee and slave are not all that different, is endless. Is it illegal? That's the wrong question, the right question is obviously most people don't want any of this because it is against their advantage, but can the government which derives it's power and authority from most people represent them and legislate to begin with? The answer is no it cannot.
Can my employer record conversations and video using my work laptop in my home, I mean just petty managers not even for a legitimate inquiry? Yes, they can get away with that. Why is there no law to govern this? Because legislation does not follow the will of the people, it follows the will of fund raisers.
Companies are people too but with bigger political contributions. "For the people, by the people, of the people", people in that context now means mostly corporate persons and their interest trumps the individuals'.
Also using your work cellphone? Which country is this? Any experts on law have an opinion on this?
Millennials pushed the aging fossils into the digital world (e-banking/mobile banking, almost everything is digitalized today). Social media changed the way we interact with people. The concept of privacy continues to erode.
Gen Z and future generations continuing the trend. Often just giving away their information for likes/impressions/views. Everything has been recorded in one way or another. Relationships also built on “no privacy” (couples often know their phone passcodes …). Children raised in dystopian households where privacy does not exist (parents have access to everything). Future generations conditioned to obey.
Now it’s bleeding from private life into the work with invasive AI models deployed to determine seditious activity as deemed by Karen in HR or Jeff from C-level exec suite because he gets a nice kickback (via speaker fees) after getting approached by AI company.
Next level is totalitarian, surveillance state monitoring as depicted in 1984. Skip the middleman (private companies vacuuming up all the data and selling to govt).
Data. DNA. No stone unturned.
Why skip it? Keep it and enlarge it. Then you get to have your cake (total surveilance) and eat it too (it's not the government doing it! we're just buying those private sector data).
Same way you can censor as a government and still be all about "free speech"! You just let the private sector do the censoring - with a little carrot and stick encouragement from you, they know what they have to do and will even jump at the chance without you having to explicitly ask them.
We walked into this situation through decades of individual selfishness, aggregated.
Privacy is indeed important but only up to the limit that it intrudes upon the public accountability necessary for a republic to function.
We seem fine with letting governments and large corporations know where we live and how much we pay in taxes yet are hesitant to make this information public due to fear of our fellow citizens. That is a complete erosion of social trust and cohesion.
Someone please put a science-fiction sheen on the death of the public sphere. There is more than the dominant 1984-inspired narratives at play!
Our cities are missing third places.
"The Unwanted Gaze" is a good read on this subject. <https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/157389/the-unwanted...>