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hnanon22 | 3 years ago

The Qatar slave helmet.

My company built the smart helmet used to track Qatar’s army of abused workers. The claim is GPS and accelerometer where used to track if a worker stopped moving or fell due to an accident; the geo fencing was supposedly for tracking if they had enough workers in an area for the job.

The reality is the helmets where/are used as mass surveillance tech to ensure workers are continuously active and never leave their assigned areas for petty things like going to the bathroom or finding shade to prevent heat stroke.

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ShredKazoo|3 years ago

This comment is now one of the top hits on Google for "Qatar slave helmet". And it's the only hit when I put quotes around the phrase to force an exact match.

If this is real you should get in touch with investigative journalists, e.g. ProPublica.

("Get in touch with investigative journalists" probably applies to a bunch of the people posting in this thread.)

ShredKazoo|3 years ago

Actually, I want to think more about the theory of change here. It's conceivable that a ProPublica article could actually make the situation worse, e.g. by advertising the existence of the helmet to other abusive employers, or causing abusive employers to rework their labor practices in a way that looks better to the press but is actually worse.

If the company that makes the helmet is based in a country with good government, maybe a reasonable regulation would be to score workers on productivity, but place limitations on the scoring somehow. E.g. the helmet stops showing the worker's location when they've spent too much time in the heat. Or the helmet estimates the fraction of the workday that the worker spent offsite, but all workers who spend 20% or less of their time offsite are given a score of 20%, so the employer can't force the worker to spend more than 80% of their time onsite. I don't think productivity scoring has to be dystopian in principle; generally speaking it seems reasonable to pay people according to how productive they are.

You could also argue for regulating the helmet out of existence, but I assume in that case it would just be built somewhere else with lax regulations. So the trick is to put in regulation that creates a humane experience for workers, but not so much that Qatar is incentivized to contract the development of a new, more draconian helmet in a different locale. I don't think this should be too hard, because creating a humane experience for workers should also help productivity to a degree.

There's also a security dimension here -- you don't want abusive employers to be able to circumvent these limitations. So you could make it so the helmet only runs code which has been signed with the company's private key, or have a lot of the functionality server-side.

MonkeyMalarky|3 years ago

How many people do you think worked on the project? If I were the OP, I'd be more worried about getting the Khashoggi treatment for speaking out.

ThrowawayTestr|3 years ago

What would that accomplish?

hackerting|3 years ago

oh man, that was rough. Your story reminded a group of people who should report here — The "Green QR code" app that Chinese government deploys in the name of COVID to track and surveillance people. I even saw a tiktok (douyin) video that showcase one of the developer, praising how young they are and how handsome they are. The comment section of the video is a different scene entirely. But the same time, if they didn't develop it, someone else will. So it is hard to put the blame on them specifically.

lordnacho|3 years ago

To add something related someone I know worked for a firm that was tasked with identifying regime critics for a gulf state. It wasn't clear what they were going to do with the list until they started disappearing.

silisili|3 years ago

I think you win :(.

cammikebrown|3 years ago

Wow, 2 posts in and we may have a winner already! That’s really, really bad. I have a friend (well, not anymore) who worked for Palantir for a long time and was very proud of it, and I was gonna ask him if he regrets anything, but this is a whole other level.

whatwherewhy|3 years ago

Eh... Was it really that hard to guess what they're gonna do with it? How long ago was that? It's not like their abuse of [foreign] workers is anything new.

TeMPOraL|3 years ago

> How long ago was that? It's not like their abuse of [foreign] workers is anything new.

It's also not like it's common knowledge. Myself I only learned about it couple years ago, here on HN, because of some comment threads that segued into discussions about Qatar construction projects.

Point being, without knowing anything about OP, including where are they from, you can't assume they had a chance of knowing this before taking the job, or even learning about it on the job. The world is awash with news stories about everything - often you learn about a huge tragedy only when you chance on a story about it.

hnanon22|3 years ago

7-8 years ago. I was a lot more naive back then and knew very little about any of the Middle East petro states.

mymyairduster|3 years ago

This technology may sound bad but it helpes enable events like the world cup that entertain many around the world

giraffe_lady|3 years ago

Genuinely can't tell if you're joking or not but it doesn't matter. Either way this is basically a paraphrase of one of the most astute dril tweets of all time:

"drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,"

terminal_d|3 years ago

The world cup doesn't matter.

MertsA|3 years ago

And just think of all the cotton the plantations grew! Surely that justifies it. /s