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- Hacker News
- This should be illegal by law. Judge the performance by the outcome.by wg0
- I wonder if the employer is in violation of ADA laws, and whether exemption from monitoring is “reasonable accommodations”.
Not that I think the broader practice for monitoring remote workers is something I think is a good idea.
by hosh - The employee invoked health concerns to reduce the frequency of those pictures (she has a condition that's triggered by stress, surveillance increases stress). She was working for Sutherland Healthcare, a healthcare service provider. I find it ironical, which just shows how naive I am, I guess.by rixed
- There's been a lawsuit about this in Europe, couple years back. Employee won, breach of privacy according to Article 8 the European Convention of Human Rights. See https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-63203945by markus92
- That is an insanely bad look for that employer. This kind of invasive employee monitoring is treating people like property rather than as human beings. The problem is that the power dynamic between employers and employees in many countries is such that they can make the most outrageous demands and people will have to comply because there is always another person ready to step into their shoes.by jacquesm
- I’m a programmer and tend to be relatively distant from the compliance and IT side of things.
That said, can someone who is in that side of things explain why having an archive of surveillance from employee’s home wouldn’t be a liability nightmare. The way a good company treats PII makes me think that anyone with brains would say “I don’t even want access to that data, and it probably should not be saved”. The chances of a leak or a camera capturing something that should not be on my server is high enough, and completely unnecessary to running the business, that I would not want anything to do with it. It takes one naked toddler and a CSAM filter to absolutely destroy a company. Let’s not even touch the idea of employees maliciously accessing webcams, and/or out of hours webcam access. Yikes. I’d rather have a person doing nothing sometimes than have any of that shit on my servers.
by dghlsakjg - Once I had an issue where I had to request access to a 3rd party vendor URL from my work machine. IT was telling me that I already had access, and that I had accessed the URL several times. Weird, because I was getting a dns resolve error. To prove that he wasn't making it up, the IT guy shared his screen with me.
Ever since I saw his screen and the level of details in my activity log on the work machine, I don't even access example.com on their device anymore.
I'm sure this workers already has invasive tracking software on her work machines. Now the company was just trying to fire her without it counting as a layoff.
by firefoxd - This strikes me as an attempt to renege on employment agreements to allow WFH. I'd bet it's either to do soft layoffs, or get people back in the office to justify real estate.
She's got annual positive reviews 8 years running, and has been with the company for over a decade.
The question that really cuts to the chase is: Why does it require a photograph of the employee's face every 3 minutes in order to determine if they're completing their work? Why does that make any sense at all? What exactly is the employee doing that there are no metrics at all. There's nobody monitoring work loads or task completion? Nobody is checking for accuracy? There are no clients or customers or community members complaining about poor service? How were they able to determine positive reviews for almost a decade before? Why is your management so incompetent, and why is the price of that incompetence your employee's privacy?
by da_chicken