'The Way My Boss Monitored Me At Home Was Creepy' (bbc.com) 91
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: Electronic monitoring of home workers by companies is rising sharply, a survey suggests. The government is being urged to toughen the rules -- and ban most webcam use. "It was creepy," says Chris. "One of my managers was watching people's personal computers to monitor what we were doing at home -- all the time, not just when we were working. It was a bizarre way to carry on." When the first lockdown started, the firm that employed Chris -- a 31-year-old engineer from Sheffield -- sent most of its staff home. They were ordered to connect their private laptop and desktop computers to more powerful office machines so they could continue their high-tech operations. "We didn't mind," says Chris, "but I found loads of screens switched on one day when I came in to the office, and everybody's desktops were there, on display. "One of the managers wasn't just looking at our work. He could see exactly what we were doing all the time -- what we were watching on YouTube, that kind of thing."
Chris, who changed companies after he found out one of his managers was monitoring his home activities, thinks "excessive" surveillance is counter-productive. "My productivity didn't go down when I started working from home," he says, "and when I knew what was happening it made me more nervous. A lot of the time in my job is spent designing things on paper, away from the screen, so that doesn't register if someone is simply looking at what's going on on my desktop. It probably looked to that guy like I was downstairs watching Netflix or something, but I wasn't. It's a very blunt, depersonalizing way of trying to ensure people behave in the way a company wants."
Chris, who changed companies after he found out one of his managers was monitoring his home activities, thinks "excessive" surveillance is counter-productive. "My productivity didn't go down when I started working from home," he says, "and when I knew what was happening it made me more nervous. A lot of the time in my job is spent designing things on paper, away from the screen, so that doesn't register if someone is simply looking at what's going on on my desktop. It probably looked to that guy like I was downstairs watching Netflix or something, but I wasn't. It's a very blunt, depersonalizing way of trying to ensure people behave in the way a company wants."
Bring your own device... (Score:4, Insightful)
...at your own risk.
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2. Your boss audits your PC and sees this activity.
3. Yadda yadda yadda
4. Now you have a better job!
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what we were watching on YouTube, that kind of thing
I think 'YouTube' should be in inverted commas.
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Unfortunately, the policies surrounding such laptop are often "flexible", meaning arbitrary. One employee may demand quite hot hardware and use it consistently for their side business, but not trigger the interest of HR or trigger a review sponsored by someone in another department which is playing office politics. And heavens forbid that whistle-blowing or union support are noticed, abusive companies can use other forbidden though innocuous laptop behavior to justify firing employees with much less difficu
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At a supermarket where I once worked, we were a clothing concession dept. The concession company (who I was an employee) provided PC over a broadband connection in our back office.
Then over 2 years the broadband was removed (apparntly for cost reasons) and we were told that we should use the store customer WiFi in the store, however the store customer wifi was controlled by another 3rd party who blocked lots of website including our concession company site so we could no longer access our stock control and
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lol. I found myself the other way with one of my very old clients. They got bought and the new parent corporation wanted me to use a notebook they were going to give me (Windows), with no ability to install any software of my choice and yada yada yada. Like I'm going to use Notepad for editing my programs instead of Kate on Linux. Corporate bureaucracy at its worst. Yes. I get it. I'm enough versed in network security to understand why they're doing it, but it can't come at the expense of my producti
If you can't trust your fucking employees (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're being monitored, leave. Market is red hot for people with skills. Fuck employers who don't trust their employees.
Re:If you can't trust your fucking employees (Score:5, Insightful)
Some managers are just bad managers.
There's a saying .. A grade people hire A grade people. B grade people hire C grade people. Bad leaders lead to bad employees.
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Problem being when labor costs come into purview, mangers (especially bad managers) are notably absent from the discussion.
Never mind performance metrics in evaluating management- there is an over-abundance of managers for whom it is a miracle they don't drown while showering. For all the talk of increased productivity, etc. for employees, improved management is also notably absent from the discussion (short of the trend de jure. How's that just in time inventory working for ya?).
For all the hand-wring ov
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How's that just in time inventory working for ya?).
Works great actually. Keeps inventory costs down, smaller warehousing requirements. You do need reliable suppliers, proper forecasting and good schedulers.
The Japanese are masters of this but that is partly because they have industrial towns where the suppliers and customers are near neighbours and often part owners of one another.
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It works great when done right. Just in time delivery is great when you have multiple suppliers and a reserve fund to pay more to continue receiving necessary materials if there is a sudden spike in prices. This works especially well for items that are bulky but inexpensive, especially if they are not the major cost component of your product.
Expensive small items with only one or two suppliers that cost almost nothing to warehouse though? That pretty much describes the chip shortage. If you're an automaker
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Correct me if I am wrong but it was my understanding that the auto makers cancelled their standing long standing chip production orders Other customers of the chip makers purchased the capacity freed up by the auto makers.
So other customers filled the void caused by the auto makers. This combined with an overall market supply shortage (didn't one of the 3 main chip factories burn down?) results in a situation the auto makers can't easily get out of.
I'm not sure what their options are really. Can they pay
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For all the hand-wring over creeping socialism, little of it concerns bullshit jobs and the corporate bloat that infests companies.
A lot of foolish things are said about socialism and communism. It doesn't help that so many regimes have hidden their tyranny behind those names.
But the West today provides a form of cushioned socialism for in-groups: the rich, the political elite, and (within corporations) deadwood managers and others. If what they teach in Economics 101 were remotely true, companies would not be infested by deadwood - as most of them are.
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Most managers are just bad managers.
FTFY.
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Some managers are just bad managers.
This. I've been with the same company for quite a while and changed managers both before COVID and during COVID. My previous manager was old school german. He was *desperate* to get people to come into the office. I repeatedly told him no citing our company's own policy and he repeatedly kept asking. His old school thinking is that I pay people so I can see them sitting at their desk, not so he could judge the quality of their work. I don't miss the micromanaging f-wit one bit.
New manager, well he lives on
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C grade managers tend to hire D, E and F grade employees because their main concern is not being shown up or second guessed.
Slightly different context, same idea:
"It’s easy to pick the ‘best and brightest’ who look like us, act like us, and learn like us. The challenge is to identify the students who are even brighter and better than us, but don’t look like us, act like us, or learn like us".
- Mark Guzdial, ACM blog article 2009. http://cacm.acm.org/ [acm.org]
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So I take it you follow your own advice and when a cleaner/builder/etc comes to your house, you just give them keys and leave, trusting that everything will be fine? You don't even check the results of work, because that would mean you hired someone you don't trust, and that would be just weird? You never get a second opinion on anything, be it your doctor or your car mechanic, because it would be weird not to trust someone you hire to perform a task?
Reality is, people who aren't extremist or stupid underst
Re: If you can't trust your fucking employees (Score:4, Insightful)
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Amen.
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Yeah, I didn't really understand that. Seems like they had desktops at work (so hard to take home) and were supposed to RDP into them using their home computers. Reporter's lack of understanding of the tech details made the article confusing.
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It's BBC, the "we hire BAME, merit is racist". Expecting reporter to be able to do even rudimentary investigating of what he/she is reporting on is far in excess of what BBC demands of its new hires. If you dig in, their domestic reporting quality, especially in "culture" etc things is barely coherent in many aspects nowadays because of their idiotic hiring and firing practices over last decade. They basically purged anyone and everyone with even a modicum of talent and any self respect.
Funnily enough, it's
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Trust needs to be earned and can easily be lost. Even quite competent people can start making mistakes when faced with medical expenses or breaking down from overwork.
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I saw that documentary. It was called "Binging Bad" or "BReaking Carebears" or something like that. I don't remember the title exactly but you can find it.
Re: If you can't trust your fucking employees (Score:2)
Re: If you can't trust your fucking employees (Score:2)
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Absolutely this. Any manager who thinks this sort of monitoring is a good idea is an insecure sh!t-for-brains coward valuing pseudo-control over actual results. The correct answer is "Run away...".
Over the years, I've seen a fundamental dichotomy: managers who trust, and act (to remediate/punish/fire) when trust is broken; and managers who pre-emptively don't trust anyone. Guess which kind hires and *keeps* the best people, and which kind more consistently hits company success targets.
(A subtext here i
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... then why the fuck did you hire them? If you're being monitored, leave. Market is red hot for people with skills. Fuck employers who don't trust their employees.
I mostly agree. But trust is tough. The problem is that you can't tell everything about a person until they are put to the test.
It's like getting married. Some women will be wonderful and nurturing and pleasant. A true equal partner for life Others will be found to have been putting on an act, and will happily destroy you if it suits them. The only way to know which is which is to put yourself in the position to be destroyed.
But back to the computers - don't even work for a company that demands you wor
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It's like getting married. Some women will be wonderful and nurturing and pleasant. A true equal partner for life Others will be found to have been putting on an act, and will happily destroy you if it suits them. The only way to know which is which is to put yourself in the position to be destroyed.
It's only women who are like this, right?
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It's like getting married. Some women will be wonderful and nurturing and pleasant. A true equal partner for life Others will be found to have been putting on an act, and will happily destroy you if it suits them. The only way to know which is which is to put yourself in the position to be destroyed.
It's only women who are like this, right?
Did I say it was? You're too busy looking to be triggered and outraged. Or of course, I could refer to men, women, Trans women and men, gay males and gay women, asexuals, non binary or pansexuals and whatever other genders you demand to be written up in a 1000 word screed of marriage inclusivity.
Yes, my sensitive sweet potato, a man might suddenly turn against his woman, her against him, or a lesbian and her partner, a gay man and man in a relationship, a polyamorous non binary genderqueer, against the
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Re: Stupid employees. (Score:1)
Re: Stupid employees. (Score:2)
If I had to guess, they used some kind of non-RDP software which was bundled with spyware
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A) You don't use personal computers to do corp work. If a computer is required your employer provides it. B) how were they monitoring their "private" usage? "Connecting their PCs to more powerful PCs at the office" sounds like they're RDPing in or something. If you're doing something outside of the RDP session it should not be monitorable. If you're watching youtube on company time inside your RDP session, you deserve all that's coming to you cause you're a fucking idiot.
My thoughts exactly... It's one thing for computer illiterate people to misunderstand how remote desktop works, but it boggles my mind that this would be posted on Slashdot... Yes definitely there is immoral practices done by some companies to spy on their employees, but this isn't one of them. Surprised Slashdot would run a story like this, you'd think the people who post it would at least understand the basics of computers and remote desktop technology...
Just use a VM silly (Score:1)
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How is the manager going to watch what you do at home once done working if you use a VM to connect to the work computer and shut the VM down when done working or at least disable access to the microphone, camera, etc. to the VM once done working? Read TFS!
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Mod parent up! He is the only one saying what I came here to post after a quick look at the posts!
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This is more difficult when the laptop itself is work mandated, with anti-virus and monitoring software and a Trusted Computing locked bios.
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In that case, there really isn't a problem. You use the locked-down work PC only to do your job, and assume that they can monitor anything you do on it and act accordingly. For anything personal, you use one of your devices. This is even easier if you're working from home.
It does always amaze me how many people get busted for things like porn, games, pirated media, warez, etc. on their work PC's. You would think that most anyone would be smart enough to do that kind of stuff on a PC controlled by their
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It does always amaze me how many people get busted for things like porn, games, pirated media, warez, etc. on their work PC's. You would think that most anyone would be smart enough to do that kind of stuff on a PC controlled by their employer.
Which is why we don't give our users admin rights to their machines. Only a select few groups get admin rights, and they have to sign a waiver which essentially tells them this is a privilege, not a right. They are responsible for anything which happens.
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My wife (a DBA) does this anyway at my recommendation. She’s a contractor so it isolates her laptop away from the various company networks she has to RDP into. One of the companies got a ransomware attack and I happened to be chatting with her and spotted it. She halted the VM, notified the contact, and sent the VM to infosec to review. Built a new VM for the company when they came back and continued with the VMs to the other companies she consulted for.
Heck, I do it for my job in large part because I
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On the one hand (Score:2)
I can see the perversion of the right to privacy. I can.
On the other hand, I can see how easy it might be to manipulate the scope of view the office peeper has to my home.
"Why in the frack does RM have background videos of sheep being sheared poorly and 1080 pixel Kanye West's treatises in view of his home computer?
Orwell was (Score:3)
way too optimistic.
Management thinking they are god again... (Score:3, Insightful)
Why is it that the managerial class (with increasing intensity, as one goes up the management ladder) believes they are entitled to 100% attention, and 100% output of all employees, 100% of the time? (eg, INCLUDING off hours?)
Dont give me some bullshit about people being disloyal or some similar shit. If people become disloyal, it is likely because you are abusing them, due to the above bullshit about monitoring 100% of their activities, eager to spot the slightest hint of impropriety, (while blissfully disregarding your own.)
If you are running into hard limits about what humans can reasonably produce, perhaps the solution is not "make the humans just work harder!", perhaps your solution is "Make the humans work smarter" or "Perhaps we need more humans."--- and by that, I do not mean "micromanage every timeslice of attention the humans have, and divert that to company profitability", I mean "Find areas of lost productivity wasted through inefficient processes, old and inefficient tools, or wasted through excessive meetings, and address them accordingly."
Standards and practices matter. Trying to micromanage your employees' off hours for company profits literally kills people. (No, as in, it actually totally does. Many research projects have been devoted to studying what the cumulative effects of stress in animals are, and it trends toward multiple organ failure and death. This is not something you can deny; a simple browse through pubmed or google scholar will turn up hundreds of such studies. It's a simple fact. Since your employees kind of have this thing about NOT DYING, or suffering chronic and persistent bad health for your company's quarterlies, they tend to abandon ship before then. This is not "Disloyalty", this is "Self-preservation.")
Also, DO keep in mind, that at some point, you cannot get more juice out of your turnips. Once you reach pareto-optimality, the only way to get more performance is through one of the three methods I pointed out above, and even then, you will run into the limits of reality itself. (due to the quantum nature of the universe.) At some point, you simply cannot get more out of your employees, and demanding more because you need more to keep growing, is only going to make your business tank.
If you are hitting such limits, BE FUCKING HONEST about it.
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Why is it that the managerial class (with increasing intensity, as one goes up the management ladder) believes they are entitled to 100% attention, and 100% output of all employees, 100% of the time?
You meant that rhetorically. It's solid gold though, goes right to the core of what's been wrong since day one. Our entire social order was conceived as a zero sum game, structured by sociopaths, for sociopaths. The goal? Own as much of other people's work and lives as possible.
If this place were run by empathetic creative types, there wouldn't be management. People who actually make stuff might hire coordinators, coaches, visionaries or analysts, but we wouldn't for one second tolerate the presence of s
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> Why is it that the managerial class (with increasing intensity, as one goes up the management ladder) believes they are entitled to 100%
Don't you mean "as one goes up the socialist ladder"? Have you visited any Marxist nation? Bureaucracy and managerial abuse are far, far worse in China than in Beijing or Taiwan. It's one of my concerns for the excited young gender warriors, they don't realize what their Marxism actually leads to.
Don't use your own machine (Score:3)
The problem starts when you use your personal machine for work. Once that happens, you're already sunk. Maybe it might be OK if you were logging into webmail or something like that, but the machine you're using for most of your work should be a work computer. This isn't just to keep the boss from spying on what you do on your own time. Doing work stuff on one computer and personal stuff on another helps to provide some separation so you can start working when the work day starts and stop when it ends.
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This is generally agreeable good medicine; However, I feel it is important to still address the elephant in the room:
Corporate demanded employees use equipment that they personally own, rather than supply a fleet of inexpensive thin clients. (chromebooks would work in most circumstances. There is a rather large market selection of low to midrange laptops that would have serviced also.)
It is an unreasonable demand from management to insist that employees pay for that equipment, while deriving 100% of the ben
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If this happened at the start of the pandemic, one can reasonably claim exigent circumstances. Many, probably most, businesses didn't have thin clients available to pass out to everyone who was going to start working from home. My employer got around this by letting people working from home take their work computer with them, but I can imagine a company telling everyone to work from their home computer. But the emergency excuse only goes so far. The company has an obligation A) to provide work computers
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There are plenty of countries and business types where the employer *has* to provide the employee with a work computer, and the employee is not even allowed to do work on their personal computer.
But the creep of work into private life is steadily increasing the more 'connected' we become.
the bent nail gets hammered (Score:2)
Sounds legit to me (Score:2)
The article is light on details, which I suspect is intentional. But when it says:
connect their private laptop and desktop computers to more powerful office machines
that sounds like a remote desktop control. If so, the dude was watching Netflix on his work desktop which his boss would have seen if he was in the office anyway.
I doubt he would have gotten away with watching Netflix in the office while working "on paper."
The lesson here is keep your work and personal machines separate.
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Yes and no.
Consider something like WebEX meeting:
This is often used in support situations, since the connecting client can be controlled by the remote. In this instance, the roles are somewhat reversed, but the privacy implication stands-- Instead of JohnQPublic connecting for a remote support session, and having his mouse and keyboard taken over-- you are instead remote controlling your office computer. However, the underlying technology is still capturing all activities from both ends of the connection
Ya, no. (Score:2)
They were ordered to connect their private laptop and desktop computers to more powerful office machines so they could continue their high-tech operations.
As an employee, I don't do office (employer) work on my personal systems and don't do personal work on my office systems. That may be different as a consultant, but I still don't run office (employer) software on my personal systems and don't run personal software on my office systems. I'll either get a separate system, that I control, or you can provide me with one (and I'll put it on a VLAN, if at home) -- and disable any cameras/mics when not in use.
Am I missing something obvious here? (Score:3)
What's wrong with a piece of tape on the camera and unplugging the mike when you're not working - assuming you have no control whatsoever over the work spyware and you only have one computer at home?
I do that even without any dodgy software installed on my machines, because in this day and age, the OS itself is the dodgy software. Hell, you can even buy ready-made camera shutter stickers [aliexpress.com] if you don't want to peel a piece of tape on and off all the time. That such products exist at all should tell you something about how dystopian computing has become today.
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It's more than just the mic and camera.
Often, corporate managed systems have QA reporting spyware running. This is to catch those sneaky bastards who play solitaire on company time. Should something like WebEX be leveraged incorrectly here (due to immediate need for a solution to a problem that was unforseen, and the company already having the licenses needed for this software, vs a better, more appropriate one, et al), that software functions as a keylogger and spyware tool in both directions, specificall
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Didn't RTFA I see. They were doing some kind of remote desktop thing, and the boss was sat in the office watching everyone's desktop on the monitors there. Not just while they were working, but while they were on breaks and watching stuff on YouTube.
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What's wrong with a piece of tape on the camera and unplugging the mike when you're not working
You're missing something, reread TFS. He wasn't even claiming they were watching him or micing him. They were recording his desktop. Can't fix that with some tape.
Not creepy... (Score:2)
Perhaps I misinterpreted this, but it sounds like employees were remoting to a virtual or physical PC at the office and their office was monitoring their work PCs and not their home PCs
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remote control software often records in both directions. Both local and remote.
Simple solution (Score:4, Insightful)
First rule - never use a company issued computer for anything other than work. Period. Never do company work on your personal computer. Personal browsing --> your computer. Work stuff --> their computer.
Second rule - If your company requires you to use a webcam for meetings and such protect your privacy. If using Zoom, use a blurred background or better yet some photo or approved background image. You never know what might show up in the background and cause embarrassment. Barking dogs is one thing, naked spouse quite another :-) Get one of those lens covers for the webcam and only uncover the lens when you are on a call. Once the call is over then slide the lens cover on. Privacy assured.
Third rule - Don't work for assholes. This should probably be the first rule come to think of it. If your employer feels the need to constantly monitor you it means they don't trust you. It means that person is a micromanager. Nobody should be made to feel that they are under a microscope all day long. If you are interviewing with a company and they tell you this is their policy you are within your rights to ask why. Personally I would probably end the interview right then and there.
I get that people need to put food on the table and all that but if you can at all help it do yourself a favor and don't work for companies like this. It won't end well. That extra 10K they are offering you won't amount to a hill of beans after you factor in the frustration and distress. Don't work for assholes.
Youtube? (Score:4, Informative)
If you're remoting into a work machine over the internet to watch youtube on the remote machine, you deserve to be caught and called an idiot by your boss.
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And if the boss is watching me remote in he deserves to face the legal consequences. We have laws against this level of monitoring in many European countries.
Being stupid yourself doesn't excuse this incredibly toxic behaviour.
Private machines are private (Score:2)
They were ordered to connect their private laptop and desktop computers to more powerful office machines so they could continue their high-tech operations.
The company crossed the line when people's private machines were invaded.
Work machines are for work, I have no problem with the company monitoring everything I do on the company provided laptop (I do have camera covers, but have to trust the mic indicator). But I absolutely refuse to allow the company's fat fingers into my private machines.
how is this even legal? (Score:2)
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Because under US law employees have almost no rights versus their employers. The sole exceptions to this rule involve (1) membership in a "suspect class" (e.g. your employer cannot fire you for being Black, female, disabled, or, in some states, LGBTQ) (2) certain activities around union organizing and collective bargaining and (3) certain protected "whistleblowing" activities involving reporting violations of law, administrative rules, or professional conduct/ethics. It's in very sharp contrast to the prot
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I'm not buying the premise (Score:2)
"Chris" connected his personal, non-company-owned-and-controlled device to a computer that the company owned, and the company was able to see what he was doing on his personal computer *outside* the remote session? Yeah, nah...?
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Fire the manager (Score:2)
Just don't (Score:2)
Don't use personal computers and phones for work unless you're comfortable with your employer seeing everything on them. Read your company policies to see exactly what you're signing up for there.
Get another job if they won't give you the basic equipment you need to do job for which you were hired.
Home Users and Slashdotters, All Morons! (Score:4, Insightful)
The boss was looking at the screen of the OFFICE COMPUTER inside the office. They were not seeing the screens of the home computer!
What morons do on the company PC is going to get logged/monitored and potentially watched.
That the morons don't realize that they are watching YouTube remotely, on their OFFICE COMPUTER, rather than locally on their home computer is their problem.
I really expect better from the Slashdot crowd. This is a non-story for fucking morons. Slashdot submitters and editors should have known that this was a non-story before it was promoted on Slashdot. And Slashdot readers should be able to see that this is clickbait bullshit for fucking morons from a mile away.
Heaven forbid you should ever do gig work. (Score:2)
If you do work through a service like oDesk, expect to be watched like a hawk every minute unless you have submitted a fixed price bid which doesn't rely on billing by the hour. And too bad for you if your workflow isn't done entirely in the box where the hiring entity can watch everything you do.