Amazon To Monitor Customer Service Workers' Keyboard and Mouse Strokes (vice.com) 57
Amazon plans to monitor the keyboard strokes and mouse movements of customer service employees in an attempt to stop rogue workers, imposters, or hackers accessing customers' data, according to a confidential Amazon document obtained by Motherboard. The document also includes several concrete instances where people managed to steal Amazon customer data. From the report: Although the document says Amazon has considered deploying a solution that captures all of a worker's keystrokes, the tool the company has seemingly leaned towards buying is not designed to record exactly what workers type or monitor their communications. Instead, the system generates a profile based on the employee's natural keyboard and mouse movements, and then continuously verifies whether it seems the same person is in control of the worker's account to catch hackers or imposters who may then steal data. The move highlights the sorts of tools companies may increasingly deploy as working from home or remotely continues during the ongoing pandemic, and the issues Amazon is already facing with the theft of customer data.
Re: Oh no (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Oh no (Score:1)
Re:Oh no (Score:5, Insightful)
Shill somewhere else, will ya?
The only ones who have to fear a Union are crappy employers that try to abuse their position of power against the powerless employees. It's kinda telling that every Amazon story about worker abuse gets that kind of ... reply.
Says more about it than what you want to say, I bet.
Re:Oh no (Score:4, Insightful)
You know, turning someone's words around only works if what you create actually has any merit. "Powerless employer"?
Where exactly would that be?
Re: Oh no (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Oh no (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Oh no (Score:3)
Do the math. It's different. (Score:2)
On principle I should requote it against the censorship trolls. But it really was a dismal and mindless FP. Also a lie. Partial truth at best, but probably lower.
We're protecting the children! (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Power grab? On their computers? How dare they!
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
If you ever get a job you will discover that most employees are indeed like babies.
If you already have a job and didn't know that, guess what it means?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Employers are more like 3 year olds.
"I wanna! Mine! Mine!"
Then throws a tantrum when he doesn't get his way.
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Yeah, but it really is his.
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Last I checked I belonged to myself.
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Remind myself never to work for anyone like you.
I note that some employees whine a bit more than others. Then again, if I had to deal with customers all day long, I would probably find myself typing and deleting several four letter words.
Then again, I would take the job just to see how much damage I could do to a company like Amazon in a short time. I should become independently wealthy so that I can do that.
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No reminder would be needed, if you accidentally were hired, you're be fired soon enough with that attitude. Or you'd quit. Either way, both parties would benefit by your not having that job.
These things are completely symmetrical.
People who want a "job" shouldn't whine that people who start a business need to make the decisions. There are much better things for them to worry about, like equitable pay and having high quality, consistent worker rights.
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It is a basic fact of the American workforce that people can work hard and still whine like children. They can even thump their chests with macho proclamations while whining.
"Down to earth" just means being a jerk who uses words like "twat" and then whines like a baby when people point out that they're misogynistic morons.
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It's called trust, but verify. You trust your employees are doing the right thing, you trust your security is secure, but you verify both.
Re:We're protecting the children! (Score:5, Interesting)
This is how it works. We monitor every website our employees go to. Do you know at what point I care? When VP Greg wants to fire supervisor Ron, because Greg's nephew is looking for a job, but HR tells him he needs a real reason. Oh look, Ron spends an average of 90 mins a day on sports betting sites, bye Ron. No one cares that Doug has a foot fetish or that Chris is a furry and that they both watch a very concerning about of pornography a day.
Attempt to stop hackers (Score:1)
Or maybe I'm too cynical and it truly is an attempt to stop a hacking problem that I had not heard about.
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For employees whose job is data entry, they already know how many entries they make per unit of time, so it seems unlikely that they care about that.
It is probably related to something else, like the question, "Is this employee working, or doing personal things?"
None of the above. It's authentication (Score:5, Informative)
It's none of the above. It gives an indication of whether the employee is using the computer, or their roommate or someone who stole the laptop. It's about WHO is using the computer, not what they are doing.
From the web site of the people who make the product:
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Behavioral biometrics uses characteristics of human behavior to authenticate individuals based on how they digitally engage their devices and apps, such as mouse movements, typing rhythm, touch and swipe gestures, or how they hold their device.
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Having made a similar system many years ago, I tested all of these variables. The best parameter is the gap in-between keystrokes. That is, when the type their password, how long is the time period where no key is pressed, in between the keyUp event of one key and the keyDown event of the next. That timing is pretty consistent for the same person and often quite different for someone else.
No one parameter is great by itself, but by combining four or five parameters it works pretty well.
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The best parameter is the gap in-between keystrokes.
I use passwords with a mix of upper and lower case. But for what ever reason I can be slow in lifting the shift key before typing a lower case letter. This of course results in me effectively typing the wrong password on occasion. When that happens 2 or 3 times in a row I slow down my typing considerably in order to ensure what I am typing is what I think I am typing. So how do you compensate for that?
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They won't, ditto for people who suffer from RSI, or break their hand or fingers, or any thousand other possibilities. They will simply fire the person for "suspected hacking" and replace them with one of hundreds standing in line for a job.
Good luck fighting that one in court...the biometric software will all be hidden behind an NDA and you'll go broke trying to prove innocence.
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Grown ups who actually know how it works are talking here.
If you want to spout stupid bullshit that comes from your ass, Facebook seems to be the place for that.
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Slowing down on subsequent tries is normal, and gives us additional data which increases accuracy.
On the other hand, if it takes you five tries to get the password right that's kinda questionable and you might be prompted to select the date of your last order, or in this case your boss's name, or some additional piece of information.
Re: None of the above. It's authentication (Score:2)
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Lol yeah that'll cause problems.
My system that my company was built on was for web sites. Every so often we'd get someone using incognito mode with an anonymizing VPN and whatever else they had set up to try to make sure sites couldn't recognize them, then they'd wonder why we had trouble recognizing them when they tried to log in.
Most of the time, the more they tried to hide the easier they were to recognize. Because they were the ONLY user we had using the Tor browser etc and that VPN. So it was easy to r
Re:Attempt to stop hackers (Score:5, Insightful)
Personal things ... like forming a union.
Re:Attempt to stop hackers (Score:4, Informative)
That's not how the law (NLRA 1935 and FLSA 1938) works in the United States, there is a right to organize here.
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Amazon has support? [checks date for April 1st]
I guess they would have for AWS, but for the shopping site you are more likely to win the lottery than to actually get contact with a human.
If you go through their contact channels, finding a contact who can (or wants to) help is [in my experience] impossible.
I started to boycott Amazon long before it was fashionable because of the way they treated my request for help/complaint. The amount concerned (approx GBP 150) is small change for Amazon , but for me to
Expect More (Score:1)
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The first thing I would develop is a program to let them see what they want to see.
Training AI/ML to replace them? (Score:1)
It wouldnâ(TM)t surprise me if part of the motivation behind this is to train an AI to replace a lot of what the service reps are doing.
Software doesnâ(TM)t unionize or take time off and it canâ(TM)t really quit.
Hey! (Score:2)
Stop stroking your mouse on company time!
Fuck pretty much everything (Score:2)
windows 11 (Score:2)
This WILL implode. (Score:1)
You can rule people with respect, and you grow to trust them.
Or you can rule them with an iron fist, and it's only a matter of time before you're brutally murdered and stabbed in the back yet.
The former one is what social species, like humans, do.
The latter is what lizard brains and psychopathic dictators do.
The former is way more successful, and hence a property of every species with a higher intelligence, for a reason.
Remember: Anyone who agrees to this is complicit. (Score:1)
It always takes two, a dictator, and a spineless mollusc, to ruin it for everybody else. Both are equally guilty.
Yes, there's other options. There's villages in the middle of nowhere forest, having their own economy without anyone else. They're fine too. There's better countries with human rights, if you can afford it. There's revolutions to do. Hell, there's being willing to die for your cause too. (If it's worth it it's worth it).
Frankly, I will ALWAYS have a bed in my home for anyone willing to flee from
This won't stop the real problem. (Score:2)
WOW, when did Amazon buy Microsoft, and... (Score:2)
how did I miss the announcement? Maybe this WAS the announcement?