A Remote Employee Refused 160 Webcam Photos a Day. Her Employer Fired Her

jacquesm

That is an insanely bad look for that employer. This kind of invasive employee monitoring is treating people like property rather than as human beings. The problem is that the power dynamic between employers and employees in many countries is such that they can make the most outrageous demands and people will have to comply because there is always another person ready to step into their shoes.

macintux

I wonder how many employer-provided laptops are secretly recording video or audio for WFH staff. You can tape over a webcam, but what do you do about a microphone you don't trust?

variety8675

Friendly reminder that Macbooks hardware disable the internal microphone if the lid is shut. https://support.apple.com/guide/security/hardware-microphone...

firefoxd

Once I had an issue where I had to request access to a 3rd party vendor URL from my work machine. IT was telling me that I already had access, and that I had accessed the URL several times. Weird, because I was getting a dns resolve error. To prove that he wasn't making it up, the IT guy shared his screen with me. Ever since I saw his screen and the level of details in my activity log on the work machine, I don't even access example.com on their device anymore. I'm sure this workers already has invasive tracking software on her work machines. Now the company was just trying to fire her without it counting as a layoff.

da_chicken

This strikes me as an attempt to renege on employment agreements to allow WFH. I'd bet it's either to do soft layoffs, or get people back in the office to justify real estate. She's got annual positive reviews 8 years running, and has been with the company for over a decade. The question that really cuts to the chase is: Why does it require a photograph of the employee's face every 3 minutes in order to determine if they're completing their work? Why does that make any sense at all? What exactly is the employee doing that there are no metrics at all . There's nobody monitoring work loads or task completion? Nobody is checking for accuracy? There are no clients or customers or community members complaining about poor service? How were they able to determine positive reviews for almost a decade before? Why is your management so incompetent, and why is the price of that incompetence your employee's privacy?

wg0

This should be illegal by law. Judge the performance by the outcome.

thomasjeff1

Bring it on, as a programmer im savvy enough to fight it by blocking their IP addresses.

tamimio

Just few hours ago I commented about how some companies pretend to have remote work while they technically are not, and personally, I remember a couple years ago one company was demanding (in the contract) to have a continuous non interrupted camera access for at least six hours a day, and that was before AI tools so I imagine this company is far worse and I feel sorry for whoever is working there now, I obviously rejected it and they got even more offended how dare I reject it! Crazy stuff

j45

There’s a possibility that enough people ruin this for all the people doing it honestly. If it’s the case, there’s probably no fault of the employee. It can be hard to remember, but companies are usually giving money in exchange for a time that they measure by outcomes and results and feeling that, they might wonder what’s going on.

iberator

Lazy people and slackers ruined WFH. That's EXACTLY why companies wanna see such photos. This is not different from seeing you at the office from a CCTV camera. If you are an honest worker - you should not worry. my 2c

markus92

There's been a lawsuit about this in Europe, couple years back. Employee won, breach of privacy according to Article 8 the European Convention of Human Rights. See https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-63203945

mannanj

Yeah. and when I worked at capital one last year, the auto navigator division - my manager after not liking me tried to also fire me with a PIP and it started by asking me to come into the office in a specific work window. after that, it changed to talking and speaking in a particular way in MRs and PRs (and "not" pushing back so much in them and being more agreeable). of course later the manager turned everything into "appease me" because whenever I would do my work and check off the boxes on the PIP he would say he couldn't see it because he didn't receive notice of it in the way he liked. Of course sharing in the pip review meetings weekly did not meet his needs to confirm "I did the things". Employers will do anything to discriminate against you, legally or illegally, if it meets their leadership agendas. I especially have felt indian-pakistani hate and abuse during this process and was just so exhausted I never bothered to lawyer up.

userbinator

I don't know the specifics of what her work involves, but why do companies still think what matters is how long their employees are sitting in front of a screen? I can't think of any jobs where that's directly correlated with productivity.[1] They could easily measure other metrics. [1] Perhaps with the exception of adult webcam models, but that's an extreme edge-case where the lack of privacy is the job.

clickety_clack

This is gross. It says a lot about a company that they feel like they have to spy on people. Also, I’d be ashamed to work for a company that creates spyware like this in the e first place.

hosh

I wonder if the employer is in violation of ADA laws, and whether exemption from monitoring is “reasonable accommodations”. Not that I think the broader practice for monitoring remote workers is something I think is a good idea.

htrp

https://www.sutherlandglobal.com/insights/video/sutherland-s... the webcam tool in question, looks likra corporate internal rollout

dghlsakjg

I’m a programmer and tend to be relatively distant from the compliance and IT side of things. That said, can someone who is in that side of things explain why having an archive of surveillance from employee’s home wouldn’t be a liability nightmare. The way a good company treats PII makes me think that anyone with brains would say “I don’t even want access to that data, and it probably should not be saved”. The chances of a leak or a camera capturing something that should not be on my server is high enough, and completely unnecessary to running the business, that I would not want anything to do with it. It takes one naked toddler and a CSAM filter to absolutely destroy a company. Let’s not even touch the idea of employees maliciously accessing webcams, and/or out of hours webcam access. Yikes. I’d rather have a person doing nothing sometimes than have any of that shit on my servers.

kingforaday

I had this funny thought the other day when I was in a Teams meeting and someone wanted to record it. Sure, we all had to consent, accept agreements, and then gain the ability to turn our cameras and mics on, but it was a standard status meeting, nothing special. So, I thought to myself, what if we were doing this in-person? Would we have someone break out a camera and record our meeting? Something seems off with the WFH approach.

joecool1029

No clue how to write this publication for a correction. Ridiculous. The employer is in Clifton, NJ... not Clinton.

albert_e

Icing on the cake: the employee had a seemingly valid health-related concern about this and the employer -- a "healthcare" company -- ignored it inspite of doctor's recommendation.