Amazon Delivery Drivers Forced To Sign 'Biometric Consent' Form or Lose Job (vice.com) 108
Amazon delivery drivers nationwide have to sign a "biometric consent" form this week that grants the tech behemoth permission to use AI-powered cameras to access drivers' location, movement, and biometric data. From a report: If the company's delivery drivers, who number around 75,000 in the United States, refuse to sign these forms, they lose their jobs. The form requires drivers to agree to facial recognition and other biometric data collection within the trucks they drive. "Amazon may... use certain Technology that processes Biometric Information, including on-board safety camera technology which collects your photograph for the purposes of confirming your identity and connecting you to your driver account," the form reads. "Using your photograph, this Technology, may create Biometric Information, and collect, store, and use Biometric Information from such photographs." It adds that "this Technology tracks vehicle location and movement, including miles driven, speed, acceleration, braking, turns, and following distance ...as a condition of delivery packages for Amazon, you consent to the use of Technology."
If you support this shit, buy from Amazon. (Score:3, Funny)
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I also avoid Whole Foods now, which really isn't all that hard.
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So what, you buy your groceries at Incomplete Foods now?
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Same Here; but I wish it were that simple.
While I don't personally buy from Amazon; I recognize that other entities whom I do business with purchase things (or host websites) from Amazon, and while I am removed from the process I am still feeding into that machine. I do what I can, though, I have been duped by other marketplaces on websites that I typically trust (like Newegg). Order something from a seller and it shows up in Amazon packaging. Very frustrating.
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The Rankled Engineer
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If you don't support shit like this, don't work for Amazon.
If you don't support shit like this, don't even think about Amazon.
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If you don't like employee surveillance like this, don't drive trucks loaded with a million dollars worth of merchandise. You can always drive for Doordash where all that is at risk is yourself and a bag for food. Consider that they are monitoring for reckless driving, drug use, theft, etc. They pay fairly well and expect a professional job to be done. Try driving an armored truck, the surveillance is ten times worse.
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However, that will not stop certain states from classifying them as amzn employees if challanged because 1) contractor only services amazn and amazn calls all the shots.
Doordash pays even less than driving Amazon (Score:5, Interesting)
I work in finance. I have access to way, way *way* more money than any armored truck driver will ever see but I don't get monitored 24/7 like that. Why? I'm paid well enough they know I won't throw my life away stealing a few hundred thou or even a million or so. My life is worth more than that.
Maybe we should ask ourselves why it is that the lives of an Amazon Truck driver are worth less than a few tens of thousand (wholesale) worth of merchandise. And remember, no man is an island, and the bell, it tolls for thee. If you don't know what that means look it up.
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Somebody mod this guy way up, wish I had points...
it's long past time to ask why private sector pays so shitty that people would rather draw on gov't benefits. Because believe me, the gov't benefits are *very* humble. Barely livable in fact. And before somebody starts to say "Jobs" well why not go and create a few jobs that people can actually live on. Not all jobs are worth having, or doing.
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I thought it was because most Americans are too old and can't get firmware upgrades anymore?
Re:Doordash pays even less than driving Amazon (Score:4, Insightful)
Two answers to that question:
1) Amazon doesn't want to pay more than necessary.
2) The truck driver needs a job.
Lets ignore Amazon's profit and say they intend to pay truck drivers 100K:
1) Where do you get the driver that's actually worth 100K? Wouldn't that more intelligent and reliable guy rather stay in his 125K 9-5 finance job? or even his 80K finance job? Is driving a truck daily really challenging enough?
2) What will the old truck driver do? He still needs a job. Wouldn't he just end up doing some other menial job?
You're misunderstanding my post entirely (Score:2)
Amazon can pay their drivers like shit because they externalize costs. The driver who cracks and steals packages gets put in jail. You and me pay for the cops who arrest them, the court that convicts them and the jail that houses them. We pay for the child se
Re:Doordash pays even less than driving Amazon (Score:4, Interesting)
You've pointed out one of the places where our society has a real blind spot. Banks spend oodles of money preventing armed robberies, but they always lose much more to white collar crime. Who gets in the newspaper? The guy with the gun My wife worked in retail for many years, they all lose more money to insider theft than to shoplifters, but spend tens of thousands of dollars in cameras on the sales floor and don't install one on the loading dock.
I was a minimum wage Kelley Services temp in a bank trust department for a few months in the '90s. Two weeks after I started they were closing down a trust and my boss gave me a couple of million dollars of checks to write and then everyone in the office went to lunch. No one even checked my work when they got back, or for that matter the entire time I worked there. The cashier in the Woolworths next door got her till counted twice before they let her go home that evening.
It's not exactly white color crime (Score:2)
But the point is I would never do it in the first place because the risk/reward isn't worth it. I'm paid enough to enjoy a tolerable life (although I'm smart enough to understand it's very fragile).
I pointed this
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I don't think it's at all a matter of being underpaid. As I mentioned above I was literally making minimum wage working for Kelley Services and writing millions of dollars of checks, at least Amazon drivers get a reasonable wage and some benefits, and no package they'll ever deliver is worth millions.
I've known a few thieves over the years, they rarely become thieves because they're poor. They generally become thieves because they're lazy and stupid. Unfortunately there will always be a "lazy and stupid"
Re: If you support this shit, buy from Amazon. (Score:2)
Volco Amazon is fine though.
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Pause to think about what? That a business wants to ensure people aren't pocketing goods meant for customers or at the very least not leaving them at the wrong address? I get a lot of things from Amazon and three times already this year my box left the warehouse, was en route then was marked delivered even though no delivery driver ever stopped out front according to my ring camera. The box won't show en route unless it was scanned as it went into the truck. It won't say delivered unless the driver scanned
Re:If you support this shit, buy from Amazon. (Score:4, Insightful)
If you support this - then make sure that everyone within Amazon are put on the same rules including the owners, and that includes all shareholders.
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Do you think that Jeff Bezos' exact location and activity ISN'T tracked and monitored every minute of every day? Go talk to his security staff.
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If you don't support shit like this, don't buy from Amazon.
I stopped when they pulled the software patent shit over something they didn't even invent. I don't know why so many people on /. who presumable rely for their jobs on software not being locked up in patents continue to buy stuff from a company that want's to take their jobs away.
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I live in Canada where my stuff is aways delivered by Canada Post, FedEx, UPS or DHL, you insensitive clod!
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https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/... [eff.org]
I know of many employers that require biometrics for building access / time clocks / et al. indeed becoming a majority of employers as it becomes cheaper. So yes, hate on Amazon, but damn well push for more states to require informed consent, direct that the employer cannot compel, provides data protections, and actually punishes
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A few years ago I was completely opposed to using biometrics, mostly because I had worked with a few systems and they uniformly sucked. With advances in hardware and algorithms they've become reliable, and now they're rapidly becoming cheap.
Your employer probably already has your photo, at least if they have security cameras or you use an access badge anywhere. A biometric scan is **MUCH** less granular in detail than a photograph, they're just collections of selected data points. You could never take a
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Of course they're using the same, or at least similar, algorithms. The FBI uses essentially the same system to look at crime scene evidence (without the automatic link to the credit card system, of course). I thought that was obvious, and I'm curious as to why you think that's problematic.
Again, the fingerprint scanner doesn't really record an image of the entire fingerprint, just whatever points the algorithm thinks are pertinent (which is why there are a few people who pop up as matches to someone else)
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However we get into problematic territory when company A makes a
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They don't use the same system as the FBI, they have their own algorithm.
Of course, to a point. They all map the relationship between selected attributes on the fingerprint, face image, iris, etc. The way they do it may be different but the principle is the same.
Since I consider wide scale use of biometric data to be inevitable I am of the opposite opinion from yourself. I agree that Company A and Company Z should not both have my data, and it's because I don't trust them to manage it correctly. Where I'm of the opposite opinion of yourself is that I think there should be a
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Where I'm of the opposite opinion of yourself is that I think there should be a central clearinghouse for authentication, similar to the purpose that Active Directory can serve on a network.
I've got one name for you: Experian. All of this will be hacked, and governments will never hold these companies accountable. The best that could be hoped for, at that point, is the losses are socialized while the profits are privatized. Personally I find that solution unacceptable as it continues rent-seeking behavior that provides no real value, nor any real incentive for improvement.
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This is why I said "a publicly accountable agency", Experian is a profit-generating corporation run by bean counters and MBAs rather than technologists and security experts. It would obviously be exceedingly important infrastructure and need to be protected from political and corporate influence, which is why I'm under no illusion that it could be successfully implemented in the Untied States.
Yeah, I'm thinking like a techie rather than a businessperson. That's just the way my brain works.
Re:If you support this shit, buy from Amazon. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't support shit like this and think you're going to stop it from being rolled out everywhere then you're living in a fantasy world. "Shit like this" is going to apply to every person in every modern society very soon.
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I'm not going to stop theft and murder, but I still don't do them.
So they are employees now and can't be 1099's (Score:5, Interesting)
So they are employees now and can't be seen as 1099's in any way?
Re: So they are employees now and can't be 1099's (Score:1)
This has already been covered (Score:5, Interesting)
Since I know people in the trucking industry I hear about all of this. Amazon will be no exception, and considering how they treat their warehouse employees, I'm sure of it.
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God damn am I glad I have a seven figure bank balance and could walk away from this shit any time I wanted to if my employer started pulling stuff like this.
Don't worry the corporations will come for that too. Probably to fund their bailouts during the next financial crisis.
Strip mining the middle class (Score:5, Insightful)
There was a story about a millionaire angry they couldn't get the time of day from politicians anymore because the billionaires monopolized them.
I can promise everyone reading this, if you've got money and security somewhere out there is somebody scheming to take it away from you, and sooner or later one of them will succeed. Nobody who reads
This is why guys like me keep saying we should have a society where we're not constantly living in fear.
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I don't actually believe AC has a 7 figure bank account (people with money have better things to do than post AC to /.) but let's pretend for a moment they do.
Seven figures is $1M. That's not all that unusual for somebody with a decent tech job who's been in the field a while.
Does pretty much imply he doesn't have kids, of course.
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Admittedly the last 7-figure balance I had was 90% inherited though.
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Actually it is (Score:2)
Also we don't have Universal healthcare. All it takes is one bad illness to wipe that out.
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Google statistics on wealth in America. 7 figures is very unusual.
Google statistics on "people with a decent tech job who have been in the field a while". You'll find that they are very unusual.
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> > am I glad I have a seven figure bank balance and could walk away from this shit any time I wanted to if my employer started pulling stuff like this.
> Don't worry the corporations will come for that too
Somebody is coming to take all the money from the "wealthy" people, but it ain't Amazon. There's a different group of people who are envious of those who have saved.
Re:This has already been covered (Score:4, Informative)
Depends.
If you're O-O, you have a LOT more flexibility in what happens. You don't have to have a commercial vehicle dashcam installed in your truck. It doesn't mean you aren't monitored - containers and trailers are routinely GPS equipped so they can be tracked (because trailer theft is actually a thing). In fact, BlackBerry (yes, those guys) is one of the big players in that market.
Of course, as an O-O, you're generally freelancing and have to seek out your own contracts.
Smaller trucking companies also generally are more flexible and often hire O-O's and such. Their fleets are also generally more equipped.
The big problem with the trucking industry are the big players - they're routinely undercutting, underpaying, and undertraining drivers. Undercutting the smaller companies on price to get the contracts they know they can barely break even on, only doing it by severely underpaying the driver (Why fly when you can drive, given "truck distance" that makes the US half the size it is). And the training is a joke, and lease deals for trucks that basically screw the driver over again by enslaving them for years in poor equipment.
Of course, it also is the big nationals that are complaining about "how hard it is to find drivers". Given the piss-poor working conditions, poverty pay, lack of respect, and crappy equipment, well, yeah, people don't like to work like that.
OTR with the big guys suck. It's decent with the little guys, but you always worry about being gobbled up. Or just giving up OTR altogether and driving local - not only are the hours better, they generally treat you better (though you still have dash cams that record everything, but it's a little less creepy since you're not in the truck 24/7 - only when you're on the job) and you get to be in your own bed at night.
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My roommates worked as an OTR team for Werner for a little while, and they hated it the whole time, they got paid $0.49 a mile zip to zip, and they were often spending 4+ hrs sitting at a dock waiting to be loaded and unloaded, not getting paid. I think they ended up only making like $80 a day average between the 2 of them. After like 6 months they both quit and went to work for fedex instead.
They've been doing this for a while... (Score:2)
Now they can form an union even when staffing (Score:2)
Now they can form an union even when working for an staffing firm
Someone may need to die but that may be what (Score:2)
Someone may need to die but that may be what takes to stop Amazon anit union and kill there workers work crunch till they drop ideas.
Let's say the drivers do an 1 day work stoppage and some managers needs to hit the road just to get some high priority stuff out. And they get into an bad crash killing some and they don't even have an CDL leading to an monster lawsuit and judgment That Amazon can't hide from.
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The only Amazon delivery drivers who need a CDL are the semi trucks that deliver to the fulfillment centers. The rest are covered by the same laws that cover the pizza delivery kid.
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There is nothing stopping them from creating a Subreddit and coordinating their actions.
Unions (Score:5, Insightful)
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Unions-Running solves all problems. (Score:2)
Wow. Never seen anyone run away from a problem so fast. So all this running away will garner is support for it's continuation by companies and spread to others since no one's opposing it.
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Insidious Corporate Law (Score:5, Insightful)
This is how you lose your rights in the United States. Don't want to sell your soul to your employer? It's easy, just go find another place that pays like what you're used to. That is what the entire argument would be boiled down to if you didn't agree. You can take it to court if you don't like it!
The government, who creates laws, is run by lobbyists. These corporations use the laws to do things the government can not. All of this data is for sale on the back end to anyone that can afford it.
This data can only be used for a few things. Prosecution, "Improved Efficiency" and creating human profiles. This data certainly will not be used to figure out which employees would benefit from a few extra days of vacation.
Corporate law is insidious. It creates little fiefdom's of people that act a certain way as only those people will be hired. Only those people will then move into your neighborhoods. This creates entire communities of people that end up living near each other and thinking exactly the same. This is one of the overlooked mechanisms of the sorting of America.
This stuff has to go. I would love to see laws made in the name of people instead of corporations. I would love to see laws that stop companies from creating their own laws. In this case, no facial recognition, no tracking, data sharing, data deletion requests, can't fire someone for saying no to extraneous things. Corporations aren't people and shouldn't have the same rights as people. Money isn't free speech.
Let's not be fooled. All of these "improvements" are to squeeze out one more dollar for the company. They are going to do that by putting us all in an AI simulation. They're going to run it 10,000 times. The output will be in the form of contracts so that someone in corporate can tell you how you work best.
We are human. Let's not let the race for perfect efficiency destroy that.
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All human things Of dearest value hang on slender strings. - Edmund Waller
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I would love to see laws made in the name of people instead of corporations.
Me too, but it's a hard sell when we all depend on business to provide the things we need, and when businesses are corporations. We're dependent on them, it's easy for them to take control.
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Blame only the people taking the money and not the people giving it? Uh no.
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Unless you are a shareholder, they don't work for you.
Completely irrelevant to the argument.
It isn't the responsibility of businesses to decide what is "fair" in the political process
Corporations are legal fictions and everything "they" do is actually the action of a person. That person is still ultimately responsible for their own actions.
You don't like what they are doing, get rid of them.
Fair enough. Cue 'Fight Club'
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All of this data is for sale on the back end to anyone that can afford it.
In order to afford this data you'd have to be able to buy the entire company. Amazon does not sell its data to third parties.
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Company Store (Score:1)
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So where are the bad parts? (Score:3, Interesting)
I mean precisely.
How is vehicle tracking not appropriate? Why should (inherently un-trustworthy because they're human) drivers be trusted?
It's common for items to be shown as delivered when I check tracking data but not show up until the next day because drivers "pre-scan" them to save time (and sabotage tracking).
Tracking employees using employer-owned hardware is not oppression unless that data is used for illegal purposes. They are not on their own time and perform in a position of importance handling valuable goods.
The yowls of complaint are why we need robots to eliminate work so no one will be oppressed by having to do their job, but meantime keeping them on-task is merely a way to help get them to do what they are paid to do. They're free to quit if they like.
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Tracking data/delivery falsification: Up to the company to prosecute. Easy to tell because GPS data won't line up with delivery address. While it can defeated, it's harder if you have locked down scanning hardware.
The problem I have with this is that amazon doesn't employ these workers, they contract out with the subcontractor which amzn basically tells them "do this now or no contract"
Tracking employees pissing in an cup on the road (Score:2)
Tracking employees pissing in an cup on the road as they don't have time to take an real pit stop.
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Why should (inherently un-trustworthy because they're human) drivers be trusted?
And there's the problem.
Companies who think their employees are inherently untrustworthy tend to create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Those that do trust their employees (within reasonable bounds, appropriate to the level of responsibility) tend to get a whole lot more back from them than those that do not.
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Do you have any actual proof of this assertion?
I'd imagine that companies that at least for companies who pay badly, and therefore don't hire the best, tracking and micromanagement improves employee performance.
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I don't think pre-scanning happens as much these days. The scanners themselves have GPS in them so if they are not near the delivery location it will refuse to scan.
Re:So where are the bad parts? (Score:4, Informative)
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I wish USPS and Fedex had that tech, anytime I have a package listed at delivered without actually being delivered, it's always either USPS or Fedex. It happened once with Fedex, 2 packages were marked as delivered, but only 1 was actually there and the other package arrived 4 months later (much to my surprise as I had already contacted the seller who filed a claim with Fedex and then sent me a second package). With USPS I would often call to inquire about the "delivered" package, and the person on the phon
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they said their drivers often mark all of the packages as delivered because they are running behind on their route and don't have time to complete the delivery that day, which just sounds insane to me, why not just mark it as delayed
Because higher management only cares about the official numbers and they don't want to see packages delivered the next day. The metrics have a lot of fake data because people aren't allowed to be human.
Lot of drive-thru restaurants will refuse to take your order right away when you get to the speaker. They're not too busy to take your order. They know that once they take your order the timer starts counting. So they want to clear out some of the other cars first so they can make your wait look shorter t
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I think it's a good idea (Score:1)
AI controlling people (Score:2)
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Once the AI learns how to do that function, people will get replaced.
I hope you didn't think this was some big corporate secret. They've been working on that on multiple fronts for two decades now, Amazon is one of the world leaders in workplace automation. You should look up the YouTube videos of the Kiva robots in the fulfillment centers, one is set to ballet music.
The lowest paid workers get treated the worst (Score:4, Insightful)
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Don't know what employer you're talking about, but not Amazon. Maybe that's how they treat you at McDonalds, but Amazon is a lot more flexible.
How may this data be used ? (Score:5, Interesting)
How long is it retained and who may see it ? These are the important things. As long as it is kept for just long enough to deal issues such as parcel theft and motor accidents. Derived data can be kept longer, eg driver Smith was in a particular vehicle on a certain day. The driver must be allowed free use/copies for any reason, perhaps to be able to defend himself from any claim that Amazon might make against him.
Use for anything other than to do with driver duties must be absolutely forbidden, eg: Amazon suggesting that they might like to buy another pair of shoes like the ones that the cameras have seen him wearing.
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As long as it is kept for just long enough to deal issues such as parcel theft and motor accidents.
Data storage is not free, especially on the scale necessary for what's being described in the article. I work in Amazon Corporate Security, between us, the fulfillment centers and AWS the company has over 100,000 standard security cameras, each of which pumps out an average of over a gig of recordings per day. I've worked in physical security for most of two decades and can count on my fingers the number of times a video recording more than two months old was actually needed, we keep video anywhere from 2
1TB/week needed (Score:2)
The article said they'd use biometrics for facial recognition, not streaming video. And there's probably no need to store the verified image once its done. Even so, if it "stores" 25 jpgs per day, that would be a few MB per driver. The rest of the storage would be to track vehicle stats which could be a few MB per day as well. So let's say it required 10mb/day per driver. I see an article that says Amazon has 75k drivers. To be generous we can say there are 200k drivers and all work full shifts 5 days/week.
Negative, I am a meat popsicle. (Score:2)
All we need to do is get Bezos a wig and plastic head shield and he'll be good to go.
Always On Camera == Better For The World (Score:1)
I used to work for a company that built devices like this to monitor 18-wheeler long-haul drivers ... and the other drivers who hit them, then sued, saying it was the driver's fault. The first year, these devices paid for themselves by showing 2/3 of the lawsuits the suing driver was at fault. The unions always fight against these recordings, protecting their bad members, but once the good drivers realized they were the ones being protected by the cameras, our units were being lauded by the unions. Nob
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You are part of the problem. There is a distinct difference between a camera facing out to the road to protect the driver and the company, and a camera that is turned inward to intrusively monitor the driver. That is a loss of privacy that should be fought against and *never* allowed in the US. No one should sign this contract - if everyone stands up at once the company will have no way to enforce it.
the cult of amazon! (Score:2)
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Unions are a double-edged sword. They definitely can force abusive management to treat employees better. But unions also blindly protect their own, such as police unions defending their bad apples to the end, or teachers' unions refusing to allow terrible teachers to be fired. I don't know if Amazon really needs a union. I am a programmer but I don't think programmers need a union. Unions create an unnecessary monopoly get their power, and union bosses seem to love taking advantage of their power as