Big Brother In the Home Office

hessian writes with this excerpt from the New York Times' "Bits" column: "Tens of thousands of programmers, writers, accountants and other workers labor at home doing contract work for companies like Google, Hewlett-Packard and NBC. The computers they use contain software that takes snapshots of what they are doing six times an hour. The snooping occurs randomly, making it impossible for the computer user to game the system. It is probably more invasive than what happens to those working in offices, where scooting through Facebook entries, shopping on Cyber Monday, and peeping at N.S.F.W. ('Not Safe for Work') Web sites on corporate computers is both normal and rarely observed by managers."

Comments

Re:Intolerable!

[19thNervousBreakdown]

You should read the article. For 1/6th the cost of an hourly wage (same rate snapshots are taken at), you can blank out an image. That seems fair to me, since you don't pay for the times when it didn't catch you, so your pay will approach the actual amount of time you spend working.

You get to keep your privacy, and your pay. As long as there's a way to disable the software (and, presumably, not get paid) what's the problem?