Its strange, how companys replicate surveillance states inside- knowing how similar surveillance states have failed in the past on a larger scale. People stop innovating, the internal community breaks down, as the awareness of STASI snitches creeps in, the culture becomes a mere veneer, a face, a playact and behind that thin layer everything crumbles, as the people in power do black market trades with the resources they grabbed.

"We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay."

Surveillance societies are highly dysfunctional and destructive. You either have trust- or you do not have a company, one way or the other.

The warning was posted on Reddit, then taken down. Here's the archive link: https://archive.is/oMbXp

It's quite an interesting read.

There's nothing paranoid described in this article. It's not paranoia when you're responding reasonably to measured and published truth.

I struggle to believe this or the reddit comment. It is a weird mix of "nothing burger" and conspiracy theory as far as I can tell.

Nothing the Insider article describes sounds unusual to me: isn't it standard for virtual workspaces to automatically time out due to inactivity? And anything you do on a work machine or across a work network WILL be recorded.

I am more than sure that JPMC etc will record all sorts of things, as I say. Many for good reason (being legally required to for a start...). I just don't buy that they do anything with the data.

The reddit comment is far more fanciful.

My boss is too busy to know or care whether I am stressed or not, he is busy. The idea that he sits about waiting for a magic AI to tell him I am stressed based on facial recognition etc, and then uses that information for something (what exactly?), seems pretty our of touch with how humans or modern workplaces actually work...

Similarly this just seems paranoid

>Upper management does not care if some employees are more productive when they are working from home. They want everyone back in the office as much as possible so that their WADU profiles are being refined.

So my employer is not employing me for what I produce, they are just pretending they care about that, so they can monitor my stress levels. Because who cares about profit etc when you can have graphs of smiles per hour!? Come on.

At worst this is just JPMC doing what every other employer does, and being sold some AI, Crypto Blockchain, Quantum computing BS software that promises much and does nothing. Then someone karma farming or whatever you call this sort of comment. And people lap it up because it fits the human brains known deviations from reality (you are being watched, people are plotting against you etc). Those factors are more important than the inherent contradictions of the claims themselves...

It’s all about the power and who’s holding it, employees or employers, with wfh shifting some of that power back to the employees, you see all the C-level executives crying about “lack of culture and productivity” and other BS, and you can almost guarantee that the tools that were used to track employees during the wfh (like the one mentioned in this article) will continue its operations when they are returned back to the office. And with little regulations on employees-employers relationship, you can expect the results.

My experience is >10 years old now, but certainly then the usual level of surveillance, as mandated by regulators included; all calls from all phones (mobile, office etc) were recorded, all chats texts emails etc recorded, microphones and cameras mounted on ceiling in office reccording, credit and criminal checks every few months.

Probably more things that you dont notice so easily, but it was entirely normal. I am not shocked at all by the "increased" levels described that have come along as the technology matured.

This is any big old US tech company. Working infosec, I don't really mess with "spy on users" stuff but I do get exposed to the tech and the people that make use of it. I have a separate lan and ISP for my work stuff on purpose.

Needless to say, I envy germns and swedish people the most but even countries you would by HN standards consider authoritarian have better privacy protections than the US because what I can do for malware/incident response is red-taped a lot.

I still prefer living here though, I guess you gotta accept the good with the bad.

Modern capitalist bureaucracies tend to become indistinguishable from Soviet bureaucracies.

John K. Galbraith had something to say about it more than 40 years ago. Nobody actually listened.