Walmart, Delta, and Starbucks are using AI to monitor employee messages
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
They want our whole selves. They want every drop of what they can get out of us.
This is so often what they mean when they say that they want people who are "passionate" about the work. They want us obsessed and fixated.
So they want to more than own us.
This isn't all businesses but increasingly this is becoming normalized.
If these same businesses all decided they were going to take your first born as collateral, I suspect a lot of CEOs and chairmen would be swinging from lamp posts (as they should) within a week.
Personally, I would do far worse to such scumbags -- things that are not only (somehow) illegal to describe, but would likely get plenty of downvotes by the most milquetoast and pathetic. Things that up until the last 100 years, would have been regarded as normal for the entirety of recorded human history.
It's an Overton Window. Business executives and their big investors are the feudal overlords who are decreasingly benevolent liege lords.
What is abhorrent now slowly becomes normalized. Look at CEOs who said, shortly after some of the more brutal start opining about how everyone needs to RTO or GTFO At least one of those CEOs said they needed a bit more Elon in them. They meant his ruthlessness with his employees.
And the window moves.
Exactly. I was browsing LinkedIn this week when I stumbled in this gem: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/samfjacobs_last-month-i-was-a...
So what he's saying is that he got together with 130+ other CEOs, who combined will probably make millions if not billions, bitching that the people who do the actual grunt work (and make a couple of thousand a month) aren't putting in extra hours or looking at their work mail on weekends.
This is so far from reality it's staggering. I work with, and among young developers every day. I'm in my forties and I've done so for most of ny career. Beyond a healthy work life balance they are just sick of working without a fair share of the benefits.
These people aren't less prone to work hard, they just don't want to work hard to make extremely wealthy people more wealthy.
Some are working less for their employer, and in the meantime are working for themselves to create new disruptive startups.
The article says CEOs are "worried", but it also states that these workers should fear for their jobs because they are going to be made obsolete by AI.
The reality is that small companies can get much more work done in less time than big ones, I have worked for both. The bigger a company gets, the slower it becomes.
With defined-benefit pensions and even traditional bond-based investments, the narrative is "The company has an obligation to me for very specific deliverables, even if that means reduced investor return." There's an appropriately adversarial relationship there, which keeps everyone behaving better.
With stock investments, people conclude "my personal success- even survival- is inextricably linked with how good the company looks to Wall Street." This incentivizes sycophantism.
on the other hand you are right that the idea of corporations as independent, self-directed profit-seeking entities with no other social responsibilities or responsibilities to their employees etc has finally subsumed us totally. Corporations are living entities, they are are social organisms. Just like a single bee is not (itself) a living organism (cannot reproduce or shelter itself, etc), but rather the bee colony is the life-form there. Corporations are living systems of rules and incentives - memeplexes.
Paperclip maximizers already exist, and the outcome we have given them is "stock price goes up". Until something is changed about allowing the existence of unrestrained paperclip maximizers, they will continue to maximize and do their best to eat society and turn it into paperclips.
If there was a law where certain types of communication had expectation of privacy, similar to how toilets at work have an expectation of privacy, that'd be nice. Some countries like Germany do have this, it's not always a good thing but if that's what you want then have your state's lawmakers pass that law.
I worked in environments where hot mic's and cameras are being used to monitor what we say and do in addition to screen recording, chat monitoring (slack,teams,etc... all have a feature), browser monitoring,etc... and that's just the tip of the ice berg, the layers of shady shit they do, because in their messed up heads employee and slave are not all that different, is endless. Is it illegal? That's the wrong question, the right question is obviously most people don't want any of this because it is against their advantage, but can the government which derives it's power and authority from most people represent them and legislate to begin with? The answer is no it cannot.
Can my employer record conversations and video using my work laptop in my home, I mean just petty managers not even for a legitimate inquiry? Yes, they can get away with that. Why is there no law to govern this? Because legislation does not follow the will of the people, it follows the will of fund raisers.
Companies are people too but with bigger political contributions. "For the people, by the people, of the people", people in that context now means mostly corporate persons and their interest trumps the individuals'.
Also using your work cellphone? Which country is this? Any experts on law have an opinion on this?
Millennials pushed the aging fossils into the digital world (e-banking/mobile banking, almost everything is digitalized today). Social media changed the way we interact with people. The concept of privacy continues to erode.
Gen Z and future generations continuing the trend. Often just giving away their information for likes/impressions/views. Everything has been recorded in one way or another. Relationships also built on “no privacy” (couples often know their phone passcodes …). Children raised in dystopian households where privacy does not exist (parents have access to everything). Future generations conditioned to obey.
Now it’s bleeding from private life into the work with invasive AI models deployed to determine seditious activity as deemed by Karen in HR or Jeff from C-level exec suite because he gets a nice kickback (via speaker fees) after getting approached by AI company.
Next level is totalitarian, surveillance state monitoring as depicted in 1984. Skip the middleman (private companies vacuuming up all the data and selling to govt).
Data. DNA. No stone unturned.
Why skip it? Keep it and enlarge it. Then you get to have your cake (total surveilance) and eat it too (it's not the government doing it! we're just buying those private sector data).
Same way you can censor as a government and still be all about "free speech"! You just let the private sector do the censoring - with a little carrot and stick encouragement from you, they know what they have to do and will even jump at the chance without you having to explicitly ask them.
We walked into this situation through decades of individual selfishness, aggregated.
Privacy is indeed important but only up to the limit that it intrudes upon the public accountability necessary for a republic to function.
We seem fine with letting governments and large corporations know where we live and how much we pay in taxes yet are hesitant to make this information public due to fear of our fellow citizens. That is a complete erosion of social trust and cohesion.
Someone please put a science-fiction sheen on the death of the public sphere. There is more than the dominant 1984-inspired narratives at play!
Our cities are missing third places.
Internal company communcation channels are open to inspection by the company. Whether that company wants to use AI or pay for agents to read ever internal email is up to them. Want your bosses not to hear you rant about a new corporate policy? Don't sent such comments via company email.
I don't think it's so unclear, and it sounds like you understand too, internal comms. I know it seems obvious, but a lot of people wouldn't even immediately guess. (My first guess before RTA was Slack or anything like Slack. I always think, when I use Slack, that it cannot be truly private unless I start manually encrypting my messages with coworkers.)
I'd guess anything that the business has control over might be a candidate. Even easier if the platform allows for apps to be added on at the company level.
If that's acceptable where does this fit in your worldview
It‘s not at all obvious that the moral perspective you present as obvious actually is.
My point here is that sometimes in theses discussions there seems to be a sort of first principles view of the employee-employer relationship where it is taken as axiomatic that anything you do as an employee (and sometimes even beyond) is for the employer to take and do with whatever they want unconditionally.
My point is that that doesn’t need to be the obviously true axiom it sometimes seems to be.
That is the current rule (at least in some places), but we're conflating the issue of 'is it legal?' with 'is it right?'.
> Whether that company wants to use AI or pay for agents to read ever internal email is up to them.
IMHO this argument needs to be buried once and for all, especially on HN. Automation by computer transforms the power of otherwise manual functions. For example, government could always surveil people on the street, but they had to do it manually. With computers, using cameras and facial recognition, they can automatically track the entire population (theoretically, and later if not now). It's not the same thing as manual surveillance of a suspect.
> Want your bosses not to hear you rant about a new corporate policy? Don't sent such comments via company email.
All that said, I think there are legitimate questions. The mass surveillance enables management to stay ahead of any employee organizing or other political (as in office politics) moves - management knows before the employees themselves realize that lots of people agree with each other. That includes unionization, for example.
Yes, if the company allows it then you can communicate through outside channels, but can you reach the whole company there? That is certainly a hinderance to any mass activity.
Fire the first few folks for their AI-detected “toxicity,” and one imagines the wiser of their “toxic” friends will find other avenues for their bad behavior. Use sentiment analysis to sound out and reward the true believers in the corporate party line, and suddenly everyone will be Slacking effusive praise for the policies of the dear leaders.
The usefulness of this tech would seem to depend a lot on how the place is managed. The obvious worry is that the powers that be will smoke out dissenters, reward toadyism, and punish harmless individual differences. But I can also imagine a constructive management environment, where the “mothership” worries that their feedback from the line staff is getting distorted through layers of management sucking-up and bureaucracy; and imagining this type of analysis as some kind of independent finger on the pulse of the workforce. That seems like it might be useful for making genuinely good decisions.
Knowing a lot of true stuff and using it to rule out bad guesses we made based on false impressions, that doesn’t seem so bad to me.
Using what you know about an underling to punish them, police them, dehumanize them into nothing more than a pile of scores—that’s neither a new strategy nor one that leads to success.
History seems to show that, while that kind of excess may enforce ideological consistency in the near term, it’s intrinsically costly to the health of the [corporation|country|institution]. Over-condition on these signals, like any others, and you just produce a culture of performative compliance and doublespeak-you make the signal useless. And that leaves you in the same anemic information environment that you started in, the sort that tends to conceals problems until they become overwhelming.
I think this is limited to the realm of imagination. It will never happen.
There is nothing maternal or caring about modern enterprise. Caring is an act of sacrifice-- giving more than you take.
Even charities don't "care," the leaders make bank through arbitrage/exploitation of other people's empathy.
Introspection does not generate revenue. At best it generates goodwill, until the next CEO cashes out on it a decade later and screws everyone anyway.
> part of the sales pitch is that these internal conversation channels provide a meaningful view into staff’s reactions, dynamics, and states of mind.
This really isn't a good thing, at all. It's that social media paradigm where you figure out how to keep the audience maximally-engaged without driving them away. It sounds like a beneficial thing but only ever amounts to assessing "what can I get away with before they mutiny?" It's not a sign of good leadership, it's the playbook of a carnival worker.
I do internal investigations. Half of me wishes we had this visibility for obvious reason. The other half dreads the implications of actually having it.
Expectation of privacy doesn't mean automation of surveillance is reasonable or acceptable. If you're out in public, there is no expectation of privacy, and I (a human) may take a picture of you without breaking any social contract. If someone sets up thousands of facial-recognition cameras in public space you use, that changes the calculus by a lot, despite no change in the underlying lack of expectation of privacy. Quantity has a quality of its own.
“There’s a class warfare and mine is winning” WB
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/business/yourmoney/26ever...
Just one example: Even though workers have won unions at Amazon and Starbucks shops, the companies are plain refusing to negotiate contracts with them as is right.
If we don’t have a comprehensive privacy legislation, something like a bill of rights for privacy, tied to individuals, AI will become a tool of totalitarianism and total information thought control. Full stop.
You can look at it though todays lens and argue this is just another application of machine learning, but it isn’t just a slippery slope but becomes a landslide as soon as you apply more sophisticated future digital intelligences to it.
That's corporate speak for "we will analyze your data by all other available means" and AI is the perfect tool for that.
We had our chance to push back against company surveillance well over a decade ago, and nobody except privacy advocates like me seemed to give a shit. Some very close friends actually told (after the company for "saftey reasons" started using RFID tracking to track our movements throughout the building using our ID cards) that I was being "paranoid" by suggesting that at some point it would be openly surveiling employee activities like bathroom breaks, watercooler conversation, etc.
Please don't misunderstand, I'm not saying that it's too late, that we've lost, and that we get what we deserve (although such might be true), but I am pessimistic that we could ever reverse this at this late stage point. The cancer has long metastasized and buried itself deeply into every nook and cranny.
I don't know if it will work, but this is what I think we should do:
1. Refuse to work at companies that do the most invasive surveillance. This means a lot more of your options are gonna be to work for yourself or for a startup.
2. Spread the word in conversations and stuff (when appropriate. Don't be obnoxious and shove people's face in it cause that won't serve any purpose except alienating them). Seek to educate and inform, not to evangelize or argue (though such things do have their place, but use discretion).
3. Shame the companies who do surveillance. I'm not saying be obnoxious or in-your-face about it because that won't do anything other than make you an asshole, but it's absolutely worth bringing it up in a reasonable, fact-based way when appropriate. I've told recruiters that I won't work for <big tech co> because of this.
4. Live your values and try not to do business with these companies, though such can be hard when many have near-monopoly status or a hard-to-avoid position. A full boycott is admirable, but you gotta live your life too. Just try to continually re-evaluate alternatives and vote with your $.
Anticipating someone dismissing me as an "r/antiwork" person (yes, people on the internet and even Hacker News do routinely make ridiculous assumptions about people based on zero knowledge other than one comment they just read), I actually think ignoring this helps the antiwork people by giving them valid points about the abuse. If you don't think they're right, then you should be very much on my side here because if nothing happens, they will eventually be right.
> Workers rights have never been won without a militant organized labor force.
Just in the past few years, many companies have started giving generous paternal/maternal leave policies. Which militant organization brought that change about? Or would you not consider that to be workers rights? If the latter, can you give me some examples of what you consider to be workers rights so we can be on the same page?
Try passing these paternity leave policies as a law and see which side those companies are on then. You will quickly get a taste of reality. Capital loves to perform generosity when they retain the power to stop at a moment's notice and lay everybody off with no cause.
The 40 hour work week was won with nothing less than years of backbreaking struggle and 4 innocent lives lost at the hands of the mitary assigned to break the strike.
US workers have not won any universal workers rights in living memory. The decimation of labor unions and the CIO in the McCarthy era put an abrupt end to that.
These policies have been the law for many years in the United States, both at the federal level and (additionally and seperately) at the state level in nearly all states:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave_in_the_United_S...
A better 5. is probably lobby your lawmakers for stronger workplace privacy laws.
5. Consider the development or use of evil tech to reflect poorly upon the people involved. Like in an interview: "I see you were a developer at Dystopitools..." or "I see you were a manager at Megajerco..."
"I wasn't in the evildoing department" might be an acceptable explanation.
"I was just following orders" seems less likely to be an acceptable explanation.
Asking for an explanation might be reasonable, depending on the nature of the evildoing.
One benefit I imagine of knowing that we'll have to explain ourselves for associating with evil tech is that individuals will even consider that evil tech is a problem. Otherwise, if all people talk about is total comp, tech stacks, and how we spend the gobs of money we get paid, it's easy to forget the inconvenient aspects we don't talk about, like if we're getting paid to do evil.
Of course, sometimes people have no choice. But other times we rationalize, "Sure, I'm actively helping my employer make the world worse, but I have to put food on my family", when there are less-evil alternatives that also pay enough.
(Precedent: I've previously heard multiple executives say they don't want to hire people from particular prestigious tech companies, because, in so many words, they assume that the person learned bad culture at the company, or something is wrong with them for going there in the first place. Adapting that idea to evil tech development and application, and softening it from denylist to being asked to explain, seems worth considering.)
Start stigmatizing evils before a particular kind of evil is so ubiquitous that there are no alternatives.
Someone making $70,000 or on an H1B may not have other options in this field, may face hundreds of applications before getting another interview.
Even at work, most people like to believe they are trusted to do what they've said they are going to do without needing to be constantly monitored and micromanaged. Anything else is unsettling and oppressive.
I would refuse to work at a company that expected me to give up my privacy during working hours.
Sure, but it doesn't really answer the question.
> Anything else is unsettling and oppressive.
I understand the argument to be made for monitoring employees as they move throughout the work site. If there is a building fire, then security can validate that I've made it out safely and they don't need to spend resources trying to find me in the building. I don't find this oppressive. I'm not even sure what I'm giving up for having my physical presence monitored at a work building.
I also agree that privacy matters, and I'll advocate for it. But, I frequently struggle to express why it matters.
Your problem is not management, it's you (if this comment represents you) and your kind. The comment is lazy and just following an absurd fashion: wallowing in despair. Your advice is useless unless people organize and act. You need to do better; we need to do better. Though management could not ask for a 'better' worker, a better agent even (I don't think you are, but you might as well be).
People facing far more difficult odds have organized and won. Think of all the things our ancestors have overcome to build the world we live in, and what do we contribute? 'It's too hard'? 'I'm pessimistic'? No matter what we were working on, I'd eject you as soon as possible.
They did offer a list of possible solutions despite that. They're trying.
Welcome to life, to challenge, to hardship, to what everyone who has ever accomplished anything has faced - many faced far worse. What is different is their attitude, which I expect was subtly taught by their opposition - quit. That's for losers - sorry, but it's true. And it spreads that poison to everyone else. Fire that person pronto.
Look at Washington in Valley Forge, Dr. King in a Birmingham jail, Churchill under seige by the Nazis, etc etc etc. Remind me what this guy is complaining about again?
The only attitude that ever has accomplished anything is, 'nothing will stop me'. To get up again when you've been smashed in the teeth - again and again and again - what you do after that is all that matters. It's also to show absolute courage to people around you - grace under pressure.
You know this; you've forgotten; you've had a bad dream. Wake up.
As a skeptic, the one-sided description of mental health, and the obvious parallel to a "always-on slave collar" jumped out. Is there legitimate use for this kind of employment technology?
As is so common, those most incentivized to produce and deploy such a thing, are the exact character that is not to be trusted with such an invasive machine. It just screams of a need to regulate, to my western culture eye.
This idea that intellection is nothing more than pattern matching is silly and needs to die. Conceptual understanding entails more than just pattern matching.
Sentiment analysis may ultimately just be "statistics" but IMHO it goes way beyond what most people consider statistics, which is collecting, organizing, graphing data. Sentiment analysis draws conclusions from the data, assigning things like "level of negativity" and "level of positivity" among other things. It definitely feels like an artificial type of thing that humans do, so artificial intelligence seems like a reasonable category to me.
If you simply wanted to complain that they're using "AI" to describe something that uses ML, please tell me so I can move along. Nothing interesting there to discuss.
"The Unwanted Gaze" is a good read on this subject. <https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/157389/the-unwanted...>
>>>> “It won’t have names of people, to protect the privacy,” Schumann said. Rather, he said, clients will see that “maybe the workforce over the age of 40 in this part of the United States is seeing the changes to [a] policy very negatively because of the cost, but everybody else outside of that age group and location sees it positively because it impacts them in a different way.”
QFT. It's always the over-40 who are under suspicion.
Disclosure: Old.
Because of our (over 40s) years of watching bad policy after bad policy destroying our work places, and speaking up.
It will not be used for anything but control and punishment.
Case in point, look at Atlanta. Mandatory drug testing is still a thing, and they're averse to hiring anybody with a criminal conviction. If you really want to be nasty, you set up office far away from the nearest MARTA line. Altogether, you'll get very few minority applicants.
What discriminatory practice would you sue over? They drug test everyone, turn away all convicts, and you can't compel a company to be accessible by public transit.
So in the quote, gee, this policy being "really unpopular with those over 40" is how you drive them out. Being very intolerant of family/outside emergencies is another way.
It’s certainly not Gen Z kids in leadership positions implementing these AI snooping policies at these mega corporations.
Reality: 50% of the workers never opened the e-mail. For the other half, average reading time was under 5 seconds. 40% of those who interacted with the e-mail deleted it. Two people "accidentally" reported it as junk mail.