Big Tech call center workers face pressure to accept home surveillance

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/big-tech-call-center-workers-face-pressure-accept-home-surveillance-n1276227

by freddier • 5 years ago

138 57 5 years ago

nbcnews.com

teddyh• 5 years ago

https://dilbert.com/strip/2020-07-05

eloeffler• 5 years ago

Funny that the site makes me agree to all the trackers before I can read the surveillance-critical comic strip :D

anothernewdude• 5 years ago

What a waste of money. If the markets were efficient these places would go out of business.

f6v3• 5 years ago

Efficient or not, call center agent supply exceeds demand. There’re millions of liberal arts graduates who don’t have anywhere else to work.

fogihujy3• 5 years ago

So, you're saying a high labour supply justifies home surveillance of workers as well as their their families?

nonameiguess3• 5 years ago

The cited workers in the article are in Colombia and Albania. I somewhat doubt they're liberal arts graduates or competing with liberal arts graduates. They're competing with whatever next recently failed war-torn state can produce enough passable English speakers once their own country starts to develop a real middle class that can demand things like not having surveillance cameras installed in their houses by their employers.

suifbwish• 5 years ago

It’s not because they have a liberal arts degree, it’s also because their hobbies are not technically valuable to anyone. I hold a philosophy degree but I have been obsessed with computers my whole life and learned to code before I had any intention of doing it for a living which is what I do now. Too many people think school is the only way to do anything. That may have been true but now there are very few fields you cannot learn the information side of simply by spending time watching videos on the internet.

danuker• 5 years ago

Indeed. Why is it not enough to monitor the actual calls going through the system?

wombatmobile• 5 years ago

Presumably because the employer wants to intimidate the workers to extract more. Once an employee is surveilled, an unscrupulous boss gains all sorts of leverage that can be applied in all sorts of ways.

tsjq3• 5 years ago

why is this bad? there's a lot of personal / confidential info they deal with. and when they work in office, there are strict rules like no phones, no pen/pencil, etc at the work area.

okokwhatever• 5 years ago

Easy, because it's their home, not an office, not a place to be video recorded and studied by algorithms. If we don't understand this simple fact we are doomed.

moritonal2• 5 years ago

So I fully agree, but we have to acknowledge then that the same kind of work can't be done at the home? On the flip side as a customer I wouldn't want my personal data to just float about the country into people's homes with loose security?

mvanbaak2• 5 years ago

Really? You think it's ok for $random company to install camera's in your home? If so, I have no idea how to respond to this.

Let's just go with the assumption your comment is sarcasm.

tsjq3• 5 years ago

it is not sarcasm.

the customer care employee who is WFH and has access to your bank / income / health records can click your details on their phone and share with cops / telemarketing companies / criminals that will come after you .

you okay with that ?

newsclues• 5 years ago

I worked in a telco call centre with no phone rules, paper shredders for any written notes, security cameras and door access control.

People still played on their smart phones and vaped weed in the office.

Technology and rules to maintain security, all are nearly worthless when wages and morale aren’t priorities.

White_Wolf• 5 years ago

Sure thing boss. As soon as you pay for an extension to the house I'll have that extra room that I can allow monitoring in.

Tbh This sort of <insert rude word here> shouldn't be legal unless the company pays rent for said room that is turned into a work place(market price for the area). While not a lot can afford the extra room at least those that don't have a choice get a boost to help them move to bigger housing.

pyrale• 5 years ago

Giving the finger to such requests works well enough for software engineers, but most jobs don't have an equivalent bargaining position.

That's why we need protective laws and regulations for the workers. What governments aren't allowed to do, companies should probably not be allowed to do either.

MereInterest• 5 years ago

That's why we need protective laws and regulations for the workers.

And unions! The collective bargaining position may be strong even if the individual bargaining position is weak.

xtracto• 5 years ago

Exactly. This is Colombia or Mexico jobs what we are talking about here. If you dont want to get recorded then you are fired and 3 or 4 people in the hiring queue will get the job.

My concern is that these teleperformance jobs have a huge voluntary rotation rate (people leaving the company). So I wonder how effective will this new surveillance policy be.

Fnoord• 5 years ago

shouldn't be legal unless the company pays rent for said room that is turned into a work place(market price for the area)

You're trying to make compromises which is dangerous if the opponent aims high to begin with, with an unreasonable take.

Even that should not be legal, and it actually is not legal in The Netherlands to monitor employees like that. It has to be in proportion.

For example, if laptops keep getting stolen at Friday afternoon, it makes sense to monitor who's there at that time, and use devices to catch the thief red handed. But it is not appropriate to force employees into Big Brother 2.0 with cameras and microphones.

Right now, students are forced into such submission as well (via forced remote studying due to COVID), and I very much doubt it holds up in court.

emodendroket• 5 years ago

In the US only one or two states bar employers from setting up cameras in the bathroom or changing areas.

908B64B1972• 5 years ago

Just build an ADU for your office.

https://www.abodu.com/

brainphreeze• 5 years ago

People aren't going to like this take, but it's fairly simple from security point of view given that many companies have to adhere to security standards around "physical security", such as ISO 27001 and SOC 2.

You either go back in to the office, where companies can ensure the security of their networks and environments, or you don't have a job. I don't agree with this, but in terms of security, when people are working from home there are standards that we simply cannot meet, which could potentially cost a small business large contracts.

Scoping is important and these issues will have to be figured out now in the post-pandemic world.

Freak_NL• 5 years ago

ISO 27001 does not prohibit working from home, at all. If a company decides that they cannot secure their work environment with people working from home, than that is on them.

We passed our yearly ISO 270001 audit last month, and we all work from home most of the time until going to the office is reasonably possible again, and even then we will remain hybrid. In the end it doesn't really matter where someone is physically working from if they follow basic security precautions if you are in IT (unless you are doing national security type of things; most of us aren't of course), and ISO 27001 just wants to see that you have such policies in place and that risks are mitigated.

ckdarby• 5 years ago

That is not the case at all. There have been plenty of companies before pandemic that had remote employees and or individuals who just travel frequently.

You're able to be compliant even without being in the office. Most of the compliance is covered by < 5 mins auto lock, security updates turned on, VPN and a yubikey.

Nearly everything else in these are documented processes and separation of roles and responsibilities.

bryan_w• 5 years ago

How do you guard against someone in their home, taking a picture of your personal information when you call the call center?

nonameiguess3• 5 years ago

The people in this article are working in Colombia and Albania staffing customer support for Amazon and Apple. If there were serious security requirements for whatever the calls are they're taking, these companies wouldn't be offshoring the work to recently war-torn nations that are notoriously terrible at internal defense.

qwerty456127• 5 years ago

An employee is either performant or not, you can easily just look at the results of their work. Monitoring call center workers is particularly easy - you just record their calls. I have zero idea of how monitoring them, let alone their family visually can add any value.

If somebody insisted to install a camera at my home I would let them and then work nude 100% time.

sethammons• 5 years ago

Just have your naked child run around sans diaper and now Apple's software will detect CP. now, will it be you or the employer who is flagged?

jdubs• 5 years ago

Apple compares picture hashes against a db of known bad hashes.

nonameiguess3• 5 years ago

I've put this is two replies, but I guess it needs to be at the top level so people who don't read the article might have a shot at seeing it. The people being interviewed and quoted in this article work in offshored customer support for Apple and Amazon in Albania and Colombia.

Albania was a single-party communist state until 1995. Colombia was effectively a narco state until maybe a decade ago. They're both pretty fast growing now, but I don't think the root of these laborers' problems is they got a humanities degree in a STEM market, and the "market" for their labor may not be much more than this or go work for a local crime lord, who might pay better but definitely will not treat you better.

It'd be nice if we as Americans or generally wealthy OECD westerners could be less provincial in our views of how labor deserves to be treated. They're not all in the same situation as us with the same options. When the program I work on told us we all need to have cameras on in meetings, I told them to pound dirt. I only half own this house, and if my wife wants to walk around naked, that's her prerogative. Don't like it, find someone else. Great for me, because I'm in a situation where they need me more than I need them. But I'm not going to act like that's a common situation globally, and these people are no less deserving of giving their families a right to privacy than I am.

I don't know what to do about this from a policy perspective. Better labor laws are great and all, but the entire reason companies like Apple and Amazon contract out work like this to the lowest bidder who then hires in Albania is they don't need to adhere to US labor laws.

908B64B1972• 5 years ago

It'd be nice if we as Americans or generally wealthy OECD westerners could be less provincial in our views of how labor deserves to be treated. They're not all in the same situation as us with the same options.

OECD westerners gave themselves, and their children, options. They were hard earned.

caseysoftware2• 5 years ago

I 100% get this one.

A company has an obligation to protect their customers' data, due to GDPR and a variety of other privacy rules. If one of their people - employee or contractor - has access to customer data, the company must mitigate it being stolen. In an office environment, they could do that by limiting personal devices, barring notes and other information going out.

When these positions become WFH - even with a company owned/managed device - they have an entire new class of threats to mitigate: personal devices, shoulder surfing, etc by not the employee but someone standing next to them.

While I hate the surveillance aspects, I want my account information protected and I don't see a better approach in an uncontrolled/unknowable environment.

benjaminjosephw2• 5 years ago

You can't imagine other ways to protect data beyond such a dehumanizing denial of liberty?

These workers seem forced to accept these conditions by the fear of losing their jobs. This isn't a free choice but an imposed one.

Advocating for any form of forced surveillance of a persons home and family for the sake of consumer quality/safety is disgusting. Why is the threat of consumer data loss more important than the threat to their personal freedom? Do they not have inalienable rights too?

caseysoftware2• 5 years ago

You can't imagine other ways to protect data beyond such a dehumanizing denial of liberty?

There are other ways, most don't allow WFH.

But obviously, you have some ideas so please share them. I'd love to learn more.

Big Tech call center workers face pressure to accept home surveillance

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