So, the Chinese model of punishing people based on irrelevant misdemeanours was not based on Black Mirror, or at least might not have been. Ford got there much earlier.
If you worked for Ford in 1914, chances are at some stage in your career a private investigator was hired to follow you home. If you stopped for a drink, or squabbled with your spouse, or did something that might make you less of a competent worker the following day, your boss would soon know about it. This sleuthing was partly because Ford’s workers earned a better salary than the competition. The car manufacturer raised pay from $2.39 a day to $5 a day, the equivalent of $124 (£88) today. But you had to be a model citizen to qualify.
Your house needed to be clean, your children attending school, your savings account had to be in good shape. If someone at the factory believed you were on the wrong path, you might not only miss out on a promotion, your job was on the line... The programme lasted eight years. It was expensive, and many workers resented its paternalism and intrusion. Today, most of us would find it unacceptable – what does my work have to do with my laundry, bank account or relationships?
Data collection is “changing employment relationships, the way people work and what the expectations can be”, says Moore. One problem with this approach is that it’s blind to some of the non-quantifiable aspects of work. Some of the subtler things I do in order to be a better writer, for instance, are not quantifiable: having a drink with someone who tells me a great story, or imagining a piece on my commute. None of these things would show up in my ‘job score’. “A lot of the qualitative aspects of work are being written out,” says Moore, “because if you can’t measure them, they don’t exist."
But, if used wisely, there are advantages :
Employees value these health initiatives not only because their bosses might allow them time off to participate but also because if they track exercise via their phone, smartwatch or fitness wristband they can earn rewards... There are several good business reasons to collect data on employees – from doing better risk management to examining if social behaviours in the workplace can lead to gender discrimination.
And of course if it's misused, it can do more harm than good :
But this kind of data could be used in more controversial ways, and the goodwill of the companies involved doesn’t eliminate all the risks. Data could be stolen in a cyberattack, for instance, or it could be used in ways that are not transparent for users. It “could be sold to basically anyone, for whatever purpose, and recirculated in other ways,” says Ifeoma Awunja, a sociologist at Cornell University who researches the use of health data in the workplace.
There is also the question of return on investment for the employers. Do they actually save businesses money? These programmes are meant to lower health insurance premiums both for companies and employees, since they are supposed to decrease health risk, sick days, and hospital costs. But it is not clear if this actually happens. A 2013 study by the Rand Corporation claims that, while these programmes save companies enough money to pay for themselves, they “are having little if any immediate effects on the amount employers spend on health care.”
In the EU, a new General Data Protection Regulation (GDRP) will come into force thisMay, which will outlaw any use of personal data to which the user didn’t explicitly consent.
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20180323-how-much-should-your-boss-know-about-you
Well, name it as you wish, but it is simple thing: powerful people love to control their environment. Setting rules is like narcotics, power is like narcotics, and it is as old as apes line of animals.
ReplyDeleteSo basically it is just natural tendency to becoming a ( not successful) tyrant, dressed in technological and rational arguments. Not much more....
True story. I'd just gotten out of the US Army, gone back to university, picked up some more computer science courses. I'd done one consulting gig, sorta on spec. Paid off really well. But I decided it was time for Dan Weese to get a Real Job, you know, one with a Career Path and all that stuff.
ReplyDeleteSo I got a real job. The pay was sorta terrible, the commute was long, wasn't exactly what I wanted, but hey. Real Job. And I was a Real Employee.
About three months into that job, I was asked to write a routine which downloaded the call log from the company phone switch and write a report, so management could snoop on their employees. I refused to write it, on principle. My boss found someone else to write it.
That job lasted about two years. The owners of the outfit went on a fishing trip and some guy on the boat said he had everything they needed, all they had to do was install a new computer system and fire it up... they came back and sacked most of the programming staff. And I was on the junior side of that equation.
I went back to consulting and never was anyone employee, except sometimes, for tax purposes. I've submitted to urinalysis and background checks for government work, but never for civilian work. I've never enquired about any of the people who've worked for me. I do a background check, if a felony turns up, they're not hired.
No employer deserves to know anything about me, any more than I do about their personal lives.
But there's a trap door in all this. Armed with anyone's SSN, I can get a credit check done on them. All this foofaraw about Facebook and CA ? Child's play. If people realised how much significant information is already being sold, perfectly legitimately, by the credit bureaux, they'd laugh at this FB "scandal".
Back when Sun Microsystems invented Java and this Internet thing was all new and shiny, someone asked Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun, about privacy.
"Consumer privacy issues are a red herring. You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it."
Dan Weese Given the amount of money they spent, didn't they didn't put everything from every data broker on Earth into their analysis? Of course I literally have no idea what that would cost. OTOH how many people have sets of keys to that sort of thing? Lots.
ReplyDeleteBob Calder James Jesus Angleton, one of the fathers of the CIA, a brilliant man, driven mad by counterintelligence work, paranoia started gripping him - once said "If you want to hide a leaf, there's no better place than the floor of a forest."
ReplyDeleteMore data might add granularity to certain aspects of analysis, but it doesn't improve the analysis. There are tools such as Palantir Technologies' suites, which do operate their analysis on the basis of "every dataset on earth" - but that's different than what happened with the Cambridge Analytica / Facebook story.
en.wikipedia.org - Palantir Technologies - Wikipedia
Corporations are hard-pressed to keep their data out of the hands of governments anymore. It's not even a fair fight.
Nor can employees keep their private lives out of their employers' purview. But there are always ways to game the system: employees are always privy to the actions of management. The old Henry Ford mentality isn't producing good results, anywhere. Even the Chinese, who are absolutely the most intrusive government - are learning they can't just take the nation's temperature by shoving their fingers up everyone's asses. Trust is earned.
Dan Weese The big data ideas are nothing but a topic for the future and likely not important here. Sorry I brought it up. I"m already familiar with the analysis software.
ReplyDeleteHonestly all we need here is sentiment analysis. Likely donors are such big targets, the social network data is not useful. But targeting people who use certain verbiage in their social posts would be massively useful to identify people who are excitable. If the target is more likely than average to repost, then it's a winner.