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Cell Tracking on the Rise
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet is reporting that with the recent advances in cell phone tracking tech more and more companies are using it to keep track of their employee's movements. From the article: 'The gains, say the converted, are many, ranging from knowing whether workers have been "held up" in the pub rather than in a traffic jam, to being able to quickly locate staff and reroute them if necessary. Not everybody is happy about being monitored, however, and civil rights group Liberty says the growth of tracking raises data privacy concerns.'"
Turn the phone off before you go somewhere you don't want to be tracked.
Just because you have a mobile doesn't mean that it has to be turned on.
I'd gotten very used to always having a mobile on, being able to be contacted anywhere and at anytime. But I got rid of my mobile 3 years ago and haven't bothered getting a replacement, and it's been very refreshing to have to make appointments to meet people and so on.
More realistically, if you have your own mobile, you can leave it on and have it with you 24/7. But a mobile from your job should be set to turn on at 9 and off at 5, if those are your hours. I'm shocked by how many people I work with allow their bosses to make them work outside of office hours by ringing them up and getting them to do errands in their own spare time. It's bad enough with European companies slowly moving towards the American model of unpaid lunch breaks that aren't even 30 minutes long, without also copying the 24/7 worker ethic.
It's one thing for the police to locate you, it's another for employers to do so.
I'm not concerned with people getting busted for doing things on work time that they should not, but it's the precedent it sets.
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
That (more and more) companies think they own employees, rather than that they pay for their time. If someone never shows up to work on one time or has bad performance reviews, that's one thing; and if it gets bad, let them go. But where that employee is and what that employee does (when not working) is normally not the company's business. Not that any of this is a new idea on their part --- think company towns or migrant worker camps --- but technology now is making the "dream" a possibility, though hopefully not a reality.
From TFA:
There is increasing awareness about the importance of knowing where your staff are in case of incidents like the July London bombings.
So what good exactly is businesses tracking employees on an incident like that?
The range of things you can justify in fear of terrorist attacks never stops widening.
The following statement is true
The preceding statement is false
Good, then let's install cameras throughout your house, bedrooms and bathrooms too. If you've got nothing to hide, you won't object. The cameras will make sure you aren't a pedophile with kidnapped children hidden in your house.
If you object, clearly you are guilty since you said you wouldn't object if you had nothing to hide.
Of course in keeping with the story, not only would the police have access to the cameras but your employer and coworkers as well.
"An employee has to consent to having their mobile tracked. A company can't request to track a phone without the user knowing,"
WTF? So if I DON'T consent, of course, on my annual employee's review, I won't be marked down with "TEAM PLAYER: -1" Riiiight....
"Some businesses want to keep an eye on their staff. Some feel they have an obligation to know where staff are in case of emergencies,... There is increasing awareness about the importance of knowing where your staff are in case of incidents like the July London bombings."
Huh? It's nice to know employers care about well being of emplyees, but seriously, what business of employer to track employees when something like "train bombing" occurs instead that of police? If that is the case, then health benifit and life insurance shouldn't be optional, but mandatory at work. Other wise, what does that really say? "We really care about your safty, but not really so much that we have to pay for your medicals."
"Knowing where your nearest employee is to a customer is also important. It allows a company to improve efficiency."
What? Any profession which requires (in my opinion) radio contact at all time may be useful in this case (such as EMT, police, fire fighters, cab drivers, doctors, field techicians, etc), but to improve efficiency on already shrunk-to-death workforce such as IT and sales (with high turnover)? Exactly how will that improve efficiency?
Jim the employer: Tom, I know you are by 3rd St. Get over to 5th and 7th, the nearest customer site ASAP.
Tom the employee: Jim, if you know where I am, you should know that I'm on a break and taking shit in a restroom.
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
You chose to have a distance between you and your job, so why should the employer pay for your time commuting? They dont get anything productive out of it, so whats their money going toward? Want to spend less unpaid time commuting? Move closer, or get a job closer to home.
/. sometimes baffles me. I'm not here to provide you with a tame little drone you can stuff into mass transit or some Goddess-awful metal box on wheels for two hours (or more!) of my day, unpaid, and expect me to be grateful for the privilege of commuting to your no doubt fine job. Every decision is a trade off between costs to the worker and costs to the business; pretending that somehow the employer is entitled to unpaid commute times is, well, precisely how employers would like you to view the situation.
The employer chose to have a distance between itself and centers of population that would provide its source of labor, so why should I waste my time commuting without being paid for it?
I've had employers move from convenient, accessible downtown locations out to suburban work parks in the middle of nowhere in the sprawl. Why? Well, you see, the company felt it could save on rent, so it decided to shift that cost from itself to the employees. My commute tripled, but somehow my wages and hours stayed the same....
The live to work rather than work to live attitude on
...in the same office? The one who uses the company phone location service to pursue and harass women in the office. What about the abusive husband who works for the same company as his wife and locates the women's shelter because of the company cell phone? As can be demonstrated by many abuses, companies aren't very good at keeping this kind of data protected from people that shouldn't have it. It's going to end up causing a certain amount of grief and accompanying lawsuits.
I'm sure that many people will accept this kind of intrusion into their privacy, simply because it will be a condition of employment. That giant stick that has been bashing holes in our personal privacy for some time now.
This technology will undoubtedly provide some useful services, but it will also be abused. My guess is that it will take quite a lot of abuse before proper rules and restrictions are put in place so that people can control when they are being monitored.
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
This wouldn't be such a bad thing if I could track the cell phones of the people who are tracking me. I really don't see what's so bad about letting my boss track me as long as I'm able to follow him around. It's the imbalance of power that's the main problem with typical surveillance. Want to track my movements with a camera? Go ahead.... but only if I get to know who's watching me and I have the ability to watch them back. An open and transparent society can make the world both safe and free. As it is now the powerful, well-connected and criminal can invade your privacy any time they want... privacy laws only prevent us from spying on them.
I would think that the company could tell you that they want you to use their phone during business hours. Whether you take that home with you at night or not is your business (assuming they allow you to).
It would be like offering to use your own notebook computer in lieu of the company one. Although I haven't personally tried (I use a Mac, anyway), I can imagine they might not be too keen on the idea. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine that they could track my position, based on the laptop, if they really wanted to. (Using reverse DNS lookups would give an approximation, or they could install a cellular Internet card that's GPS capable and do it that way.)
I have no problem in theory with my employer tracking my location during the working day. I could even see how it might be convenient (preventing a lot of "hey, are you working at site xyz today?" emails). I admit it has a certain potential for obnoxious use, but in the end, I think smart companies will realize that pestering their employees is counterproductive. If your most productive employee spends three hours a day eating lunch, who cares? As long as he or she is generating revenue for the company, a smart manager knows when not to get in the way. It's the same issue as Internet access. I think companies have the right to censor or filter their corporate intranets, but if they're smart, they won't.
I've worked for a bunch of high-tech firms, and none of them were laid-back, granola-munching hippie enterprises, yet none of them censored or blocked their Internet. How you got your work done was your business; if that included reading Slashdot or NFL News or whatever in the morning, more power to you. If you didn't perform, you got fired. That's the way it should be.
If you only do two hours of 'real work' a day, and spend the rest of the time reading Somethingawful, but do more in that two hours than everybody else does in eight, more power to you. If you work your butt off for ten hours a day, but do less in ten hours than most people do in two, you're fired. Nobody wants to know -- or cares -- how hard you work; what really matters is what you turn out at the end of the day/week/month/project.
If my company started getting on me about my Internet use, or (getting back to the article here) complaining because of where I was during the day based on cellphone-tracking data, and I was otherwise doing my job and generating revenue for the company, I'd quit. Not just out of spite because they're cutting into my Slashdot time, or hang-out-at-the-diner time, but because it would be indicative of a serious problem with how they were measuring performance.
So in short, the technology (cell phone tracking) isn't a problem. It's the companies who would use such a thing obnoxiously that are a problem, but in the end all they're going to do is hurt themselves by driving away good people to firms that have real performance-based metrics. I have some sympathy for somebody who works at a company that treats them like that, but only if it's a new situation. If you've been dealing with it for a while and it doesn't seem like it's going to change, dust off your resume and move along.
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