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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I disagree strongly because this is the typical frog in boiling water scenario. You don't see it coming untill it is too late.
Truck drivers are not tracked individually instead the trucks they drive are. This is very different to tracking a human being, even if it is under the guise of a phone.
Also a HN reader should at least be able to foresee the dystopian future this leads to. Data analytics on toilet breaks, and how employee 115 seems to take longer than the average by 10% which is now a metric for some middle manager to use.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Because the private phone is the one the person wants not to be without when they go on their three hour lunch.
But that is actually wrong.
Suppose I have two devices: work and personal. Suppose I have the choice where to install this thing.
I'm going to put it on my personal one, and leave that at my post while I go for that three hour luch. I will take the work device, so I can monitor what is going on at work, and be prepared to scurry back on a moment's notice.
Ideally, I would get some second personal device for this app, like an old phone I no longer use. Leave that at work, and go for the three hour lunch with both the work device and the non-decoy personal one.
I think the nature of the work is a bit different though. Truck driving is an inherently geospatial and logistical industry, as well as a regulated one in the sense that employers have to make sure their drivers are resting. Likewise, client value is also derived from knowing exactly where their delivery is, if it's delayed, where it's delayed, etc.. Also the trucks are often owned by the company, so they're at the very least just keeping tabs on their assets.
This is different than say, a software developer's computer tracking their location for purely surveillance reasons.
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.
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!)
" 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.
- "Toronto employment lawyer Lior Samfiru told Go Public that employers can compel employees to download an app on their cell phone — but only if they're told it's a requirement when they are hired."
So it's legal. Moreover, the lawyer continues saying that an employer can fire someone for any reason. So, if you don't sign an addendum with app requirement and install the app on your personal phone, then you are fired.
Now, I am amazed that an employer can legally have rights on other properties (hardware and data), and we are speaking of Canada here. I fear to know what they can do on more liberal countries (like the usa).
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] piokoch|5 years ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] CivBase|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] NullInvictus|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] duxup|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hombre_fatal|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drewzero1|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ramblerman|5 years ago|reply
I disagree strongly because this is the typical frog in boiling water scenario. You don't see it coming untill it is too late.
Truck drivers are not tracked individually instead the trucks they drive are. This is very different to tracking a human being, even if it is under the guise of a phone.
Also a HN reader should at least be able to foresee the dystopian future this leads to. Data analytics on toilet breaks, and how employee 115 seems to take longer than the average by 10% which is now a metric for some middle manager to use.
[+] [-] seriousquestion|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ggvvfdde|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elil17|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rurp|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dheera|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] soneil|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] AlwaysRock|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kgwxd|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shivetya|5 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] kazinator|5 years ago|reply
But that is actually wrong.
Suppose I have two devices: work and personal. Suppose I have the choice where to install this thing.
I'm going to put it on my personal one, and leave that at my post while I go for that three hour luch. I will take the work device, so I can monitor what is going on at work, and be prepared to scurry back on a moment's notice.
Ideally, I would get some second personal device for this app, like an old phone I no longer use. Leave that at work, and go for the three hour lunch with both the work device and the non-decoy personal one.
[+] [-] brailsafe|5 years ago|reply
This is different than say, a software developer's computer tracking their location for purely surveillance reasons.
[+] [-] dcanelhas|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] chriswarbo|5 years ago|reply
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!)
[+] [-] gambiting|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] skynet-9000|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kaiju0|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barsonme|5 years ago|reply
Interestingly enough the app is built by a company in the UK.
[+] [-] cedricgle|5 years ago|reply
Now, I am amazed that an employer can legally have rights on other properties (hardware and data), and we are speaking of Canada here. I fear to know what they can do on more liberal countries (like the usa).
[+] [-] LatteLazy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] windex|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] minikites|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simple_phrases|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bpodgursky|5 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] korethr|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] andrew_v4|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] elzbardico|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mLuby|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] yardie|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justin_oaks|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kevwil|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] indymike|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] type0|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acomjean|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] smitty1e|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LinuxBender|5 years ago|reply
[Edited from Would Google and Facebook employees comply]
[+] [-] sneak|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] shadowgovt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] UweSchmidt|5 years ago|reply
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.