JPMorgan Staff Report 'Paranoia' Amid Increased Company Surveillance

https://www.businessinsider.com/jpmorgan-chase-employees-describe-fear-mass-workplace-data-surveillance-wadu-2022-5

by moonka • 3 years ago

73 31 3 years ago

krageon• 3 years ago

There's nothing paranoid described in this article. It's not paranoia when you're responding reasonably to measured and published truth.

slackfan• 3 years ago

Dismissing the feelings as paranoia is a technique to normalize whatever the thing is that people are upset about.

AHOHA• 3 years ago

It’s all about the power and who’s holding it, employees or employers, with wfh shifting some of that power back to the employees, you see all the C-level executives crying about “lack of culture and productivity” and other BS, and you can almost guarantee that the tools that were used to track employees during the wfh (like the one mentioned in this article) will continue its operations when they are returned back to the office. And with little regulations on employees-employers relationship, you can expect the results.

PicassoCTs2• 3 years ago

Its strange, how companys replicate surveillance states inside- knowing how similar surveillance states have failed in the past on a larger scale. People stop innovating, the internal community breaks down, as the awareness of STASI snitches creeps in, the culture becomes a mere veneer, a face, a playact and behind that thin layer everything crumbles, as the people in power do black market trades with the resources they grabbed.

"We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay."

Surveillance societies are highly dysfunctional and destructive. You either have trust- or you do not have a company, one way or the other.

gumballindie2• 3 years ago

Corporations love dictatorships - almost all of them suffer from the cult of personality, have a tendency towards draconian measures and love state money.

namaria3• 3 years ago

Corporations are dictatorships. Having a corporate job is living in a totalitarian state one workday at a time.

Andaith• 3 years ago

The warning was posted on Reddit, then taken down. Here's the archive link: https://archive.is/oMbXp

It's quite an interesting read.

1827163• 3 years ago

Assuming the article is true, then this is what you get when we are living in a de-facto Police State? The frog has boiled so slowly we didn't see it coming.

I'd personally prefer living out in the sticks, growing my own food rather than being subjected to this level of monitoring.

In fact it's likely that intelligence agencies are building similar psychological profiles on all of us based on our Internet activity. With machine learning to infer things about us in ways we could never anticipate. Stuff that well and truly rivals East Germany here.

herculity275• 3 years ago

I'd personally prefer living out in the sticks, growing my own food rather than being subjected to this level of monitoring.

I highly recommend people saying stuff like this to actually try out the said lifestyle for an extended period of time.

pyuser583• 3 years ago

Assuming the article is true

The article goes and forth between what data is collected and how it used.

The author speculates data is being used in the most invasive way possible.

I bet they’re collecting lots of data and just sitting on it. It’s there if they need it for a lawsuit.

But the idea your manager is getting notifications because a machine learning algorithm thinks you are less focused than yesterday - that’s not likely.

mattpallissard• 3 years ago

I'd personally prefer living out in the sticks, growing my own food rather than being subjected to this level of monitoring.

Come on in, the waters fine. We also have enough tin-foil hats out here for everyone.

elzbardico• 3 years ago

Modern capitalist bureaucracies tend to become indistinguishable from Soviet bureaucracies.

John K. Galbraith had something to say about it more than 40 years ago. Nobody actually listened.

tonyedgecombe• 3 years ago

Except without the Gulag.

Even the Koch brothers decided they needed to stay within the law after losing a number of law suits in the nineties.

malermeister• 3 years ago

May I introduce you to the prison-industrial complex?

blitzar3• 3 years ago

My experience is >10 years old now, but certainly then the usual level of surveillance, as mandated by regulators included; all calls from all phones (mobile, office etc) were recorded, all chats texts emails etc recorded, microphones and cameras mounted on ceiling in office reccording, credit and criminal checks every few months.

Probably more things that you dont notice so easily, but it was entirely normal. I am not shocked at all by the "increased" levels described that have come along as the technology matured.

badrabbit2• 3 years ago

This is any big old US tech company. Working infosec, I don't really mess with "spy on users" stuff but I do get exposed to the tech and the people that make use of it. I have a separate lan and ISP for my work stuff on purpose.

Needless to say, I envy germns and swedish people the most but even countries you would by HN standards consider authoritarian have better privacy protections than the US because what I can do for malware/incident response is red-taped a lot.

I still prefer living here though, I guess you gotta accept the good with the bad.

achrono• 3 years ago

How exactly does a separate LAN or ISP help?

blitzar3• 3 years ago

VPN can be used both ways - to connect into the workplace, and for the workplace to connect into your home network. Configuring a pi to do the same thing is trivial, a configured workplace machine is totally outside of your control and should be considered as such.

It is not of much use except to packet sniff your network - unless you have network drives with no passwords on the shares or some other network attached equipment like cameras etc.

badrabbit2• 3 years ago

Info about your lan devices,etc... shows up and not just the company but several 3rd parties get your external IP associated with your work account and those same vendors see your IP from personal devices/clients.

Most people are too screwed anyways, they would sync their personal google account on a work machine even lol.

JohnFen• 3 years ago

Yep.

This is why I have a strict policy of never using my personal equipment for work stuff, and never using work equipment for personal stuff. Commingling the two things is just asking for trouble.

LatteLazy• 3 years ago

I struggle to believe this or the reddit comment. It is a weird mix of "nothing burger" and conspiracy theory as far as I can tell.

Nothing the Insider article describes sounds unusual to me: isn't it standard for virtual workspaces to automatically time out due to inactivity? And anything you do on a work machine or across a work network WILL be recorded.

I am more than sure that JPMC etc will record all sorts of things, as I say. Many for good reason (being legally required to for a start...). I just don't buy that they do anything with the data.

The reddit comment is far more fanciful.

My boss is too busy to know or care whether I am stressed or not, he is busy. The idea that he sits about waiting for a magic AI to tell him I am stressed based on facial recognition etc, and then uses that information for something (what exactly?), seems pretty our of touch with how humans or modern workplaces actually work...

Similarly this just seems paranoid

Upper management does not care if some employees are more productive when they are working from home. They want everyone back in the office as much as possible so that their WADU profiles are being refined.

So my employer is not employing me for what I produce, they are just pretending they care about that, so they can monitor my stress levels. Because who cares about profit etc when you can have graphs of smiles per hour!? Come on.

At worst this is just JPMC doing what every other employer does, and being sold some AI, Crypto Blockchain, Quantum computing BS software that promises much and does nothing. Then someone karma farming or whatever you call this sort of comment. And people lap it up because it fits the human brains known deviations from reality (you are being watched, people are plotting against you etc). Those factors are more important than the inherent contradictions of the claims themselves...

JPMorgan Staff Report 'Paranoia' Amid Increased Company Surveillance

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