Slashdot Mirror
A New Corporate AI Can Read Your Emails - and Your Mind (fortune.com)
"Okay, as of last night, who were the people who were most disgruntled...? Show me the top 10." An anonymous Slashdot reader shares their report on a fascinating Fortune magazine article:
"One company says it can spot 'insider threats' before they happen -- by reading all your workers' email." Working with a former CIA consultant, Stroz Friedberg developed a software that "combs through an organization's emails and text messages -- millions a day, the company says -- looking for high usage of words and phrases that language psychologists associate with certain mental states and personality profiles...
"Many companies already have the ability to run keyword searches of employees' emails, looking for worrisome words and phrases like 'embezzle' and 'I loathe this job'. But the Stroz Friedberg software, called Scout, aspires to go a giant step further, detecting indirectly, through unconscious syntactic and grammatical clues, workers' anger, financial or personal stress, and other tip-offs that an employee might be about to lose it... It uses an algorithm based on linguistic tells found to connote feelings of victimization, anger, and blame."
The article reports that 27% of cyber-attacks "come from within," according to a study of 562 organizations that was partly conducted by the U.S. Secret Service, with 43% of the surveyed companies reporting an "insider attack" within the last year.
"Many companies already have the ability to run keyword searches of employees' emails, looking for worrisome words and phrases like 'embezzle' and 'I loathe this job'. But the Stroz Friedberg software, called Scout, aspires to go a giant step further, detecting indirectly, through unconscious syntactic and grammatical clues, workers' anger, financial or personal stress, and other tip-offs that an employee might be about to lose it... It uses an algorithm based on linguistic tells found to connote feelings of victimization, anger, and blame."
The article reports that 27% of cyber-attacks "come from within," according to a study of 562 organizations that was partly conducted by the U.S. Secret Service, with 43% of the surveyed companies reporting an "insider attack" within the last year.
We use our smartphone's private mail to trash the bosses.
Saves me some reading, eh.
on our cell phones to run emails through to make sure we aren't going to get fired for using a word that has a 52% correlation with sabotage. Just another example of technology making our lives easier, all thanks to corporations.
Frankly I think this is nothing more than fear mongering. I also feel sorry for anyone accused by this software; I'm sure having to crawl on the carpet and somehow argue against some shady, dubious algorithm will be a wonderful experience.
Also, do people really send emails from their corporate account with the words, "I loathe this job"? Give me a break.
Any place I worked for before would've used the flags raised by such software only to alert the manager. It would be up to him then to decide how (and even whether) to act.
Staffing is a difficult and expensive part of running a corporation. Maybe, not for burger-joints — but certainly for anything using corporate e-mail to begin with. Firing or even disciplining an otherwise useful employee over his being tired or experiencing a financial strain is rather counter-productive.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
And you are not the real EditorDavid.
Will it catch stuff like "Hi, I'm Bezz Led" which could be followed by almost anything...
Why don't they just ASK our opinions on office flow and harmony (or lack of) instead of buy expensive buggy crapware to do it?
Table-ized A.I.
No intelligence here.
The mindlessness of this technology is it's number one selling point.
As rumour goes around (you're soaking in it), dutiful employees will onboard yet another reason to paint within arbitrary and demeaning corporate lines like good passionless drones (have I flunked the test?)
Here is a rather chilling passage from The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
What this software really means is that I, like many other employees, am going to have to change my signature.
--
Ima Embezzler, 123 Ihatemyjob Street, Killmy Coworkers, California
People will just use other channels for that type of communication. And there is also a serious risk: Many people will not communicate needed information for fear to be caught by this. In the ultimate consequence this can do much more damage than it helps.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Maybe they could invest money in treating workers better instead of snooping on them?
If you have something to hide, don't use corporate email.
I know, I'm supposed to have a knee-jerk reaction that this is bad and innocent people will get in trouble, yada yada yada... but I don't. There's far too much fear mongering here that Slashdot is almost unreadable these days. It could be an interesting idea in linguistics and data mining to identify potential workplace threats and troubled workers. There shouldn't be an expectation of privacy in workplace emails. If you want that, use a private account to discuss things.
Whether this is good or bad comes down to how you react to an alert. If this is used to fire or penalize employees who are troubled, it will only exacerbate real problems. Likewise, a culture of big brother won't develop any kind of trust in the workplace and will lower morale and productivity. This also shouldn't be used to look for crimes like theft and embezzlement because those are best dealt with through good inventory, record keeping, and frequent audits. For genuinely troubled employees, however, this might actually be useful if it leads to a confidential meeting with a third party or ombudsman who tries to help the employee. If it's used to actually help troubled employers who might not reach out for help on their own, it could actually help people while protecting the company. If used properly, it's a good thing.
Sadly, the tinfoil hat crowd that dominates this site will ensure that no productive or positive discussion of this occurs here. That's unfortunate because it could actually help people and it's better than actual people snooping on emails. It's also interesting how such a system might be able to detect levels of stress in employees and the techniques that might be used. Sadly, I highly doubt any such discussion will take place in this able reticle thanks to the paranoid delusional people here.
linguistic tells found to connote feelings of victimization, anger, and blame.
And of course there is no possible way the "feelings of victimization, anger, and blame" could possibly arise from having one's every word analyzed for telltale signs of feelings of victimization, anger, and blame. We better ratchet up that monitoring some more.
This re-affirms my decision to leave corporate America. I drive a truck now and thank the lord because shit like this pisses me off. I don't like our corporate overlords.
... and write accordingly. I do it for as long I can remember.
Anyway... who in their right mind would write 'I loathe this job' in a corporate mail?
If this gets to be a problem, maybe someone should write a program that will 'scrub' your email before you post it, Flag, remove, or replace those subconscious red flags that you put in.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
I get that many clueless HR departments would install this, but those with actual (competent) analytics teams would avoid this or implement it very carefully. It is a huge can of worms with minimal benefit. Maybe you correctly flag a few risky people, but you equally risk false flags with expensive legal ramifications. Not only that, but you suddenly have a massive trove of data that an upset employee could use against you to potentially show a pattern of practice in a discrimination case, legit or not. Even the kindest, least discriminatory employer has a few employees who are picked on by others. Way too easy for this tool to get turned right around on the employer and HR departments are risk averse.
1. Do not, under any circumstance, say anything in email that you wouldn't say to your boss' face.
2. See #1.
It's not rocket science, people. Most IT depts I've been in have language in the "IT Policy" newbs must sign saying something like "All communications may be monitored bla bla bla"
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
This stuff falls into pseudo-science much like a polygraph does. The first time they fire someone based on what amounts to ' digital profiling ' it will likely be quite a costly mistake.
Besides, there is nothing in my contract that states I have to like my job. I just have to do it.
I would think that if folks were not afraid of the fallout, any given company would find that a rather significant percentage of their workforce thinks less than positive thoughts about their job in general.
I bitch about work in the company's chat rooms. I know my boss, and his boss, can see my messages. That doesn't stop me from not-so-subtly complaining about corporate bureacracy.
Currently, humans read my communications and make subjective judgement calls based on which snippets of my conversation they might have noticed. Hopefully they think "Ray is highly motivated to improve our most problemtic processes". :)
The the only difference a system like this would make for me would be that the interpretation would be more objective and based on a larger sample of my communications.
They shoot spies, don't they?
In the near future, employees will protecting themselves from false (or otherwise) accusations by never personally getting involved in their own email correspondence.
http://www.wired.com/2015/11/google-is-using-ai-to-create-automatic-replies-in-gmail/
... and write accordingly. I do it for as long I can remember.
Anyway... who in their right mind would write 'I loathe this job' in a corporate mail?
* * * *
Those who do not grovel or worship those in charge for the opportunity to work for them. Those whose skills could transfer to any number of companies if push came to shove.
These are your " go-to " people. They get shit done. Quickly and efficiently. They do not deal with stupidity or bureaucracy well. Give them a task, however, and it gets done.
You could fire them, but then you're left with the special snowflakes all of which rely on the " answer guy " you just fired to get things done.
Once your top talent is gone, how does this reflect overall on the manager in charge going forward when shit no longer gets done like it used to. Pretty soon guess whose head is on the chopping block ?
All because X doesn't hide their thoughts about how they feel about the company in general ?
Choose wisely.
that ought to winnow out the bosses with silly ideas.
hahahahah ha haha oh jeez, my side hurts....
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Minority TPS Report.
This is the best kind of software: one that gives an opaque authoritative answer that users are likely to just take on faith. Cheap; no quality control necessary.
you become, from worrying about retribution.
you can see the trend clearly in the government and large corporations.
Nobody that is actually critical is threatened by this. I would not be either. But it is important to also provide reasonable working conditions to the average worker, or social peace will be threatened. And they will not know how to deal with this and clamp up in fear. I have seen it happening in a similar situation.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I trust The Computer! The Computer is my friend! I love The Computer!
I've always thought that saying anything negative about my company, co-workers, etc, using company resources is a "violation" of my "professional ethics" anyway. When I'm on a job, I see myself as a professional IT worker, and don't discuss my personal feelings about anything at all via corporate email. My feelings towards the corp have little to do with system uptime, resolving hardware issues, etc. My feelings might be useful if I'm tasked with pinning down some "power user" to install some software on their PC if their known to be "combative towards IT", but even then I know how to professionally phrase my potential issues. If your highly disgruntled at your job, you should probably be making plans to move on anyway and shouldn't need some AI to tell you so.
Corp email is owned by said corp. Nothing you do or say using the corp's time or infrastructure is private. This isn't something new, its always been this way. What annoys me even more is that the CIA is considering a database search that adds to a tally then does some percentage calculations an AI. Really? What could be boiled down to a few search lines, simple addition, and maybe a SQL table of "key words" is an AI?
There are too many Dr. Mengeles out there.
There are fairly easily implemented algorithms with good research backup (the millions of emails released in Enron discovery were a treasure trove for researchers)...
There are algorithms which can tell whether you are emailing your boss, a peer, a subordinate, or a friend/spouse by looking at things like word lengths, sentence lengths, and simple parts of speech. there are also algorithms that categorize your personality along the 5 major traits.. For instance, some people will use "we should do X" and others use "you will do X" when communicating with their team.
In any case there is also software that looks at whether there's a change in your communication style either universally, or with one specific group.
There are researchers who claim good (significance p 0.05) predictive ability on employees quitting or leaving within the next 4 weeks.
This is all the same kind of thing that can analyze books and tell you who the author is, even with a pseudonym.
Just watched 'Some terms and conditions may apply' (2013) which details the loss of digital privacy around the world, for the benefit of some stranger. So, not surprised.
So everyone working more than 38 hours/week in the corporate rat-race? Leaving aside the issue of another secret list, it doesn't say how it's going to handle these "potential terrorists". Possibly stop them buying more guns: In the USA, politicians always pretend a potential terrorist doesn't already own guns. If corporations start firing people, morale and productivity will plummet; and the 'cleansing' will have to stop before the corporation self-destructs.
(((Friedberg)))
you make the mistake of assuming that managements goal is to maximize corporate valu'e to shareholders instead of maximizing returns to themselves. to put that another way, they don't care if the snowflakes fail , they can be fired too. what matters to management is that the troublesome prophet is removed.
RTFA.
This is not about being rude or stupid in email. This is digital "micro-tells" - The idea that people give away their emotional state by subconscious actions that are not visible to the untrained eye. Word choice, sentence construction, word count, punctuation, time of day that the message is sent, time elapsed between receiving a message and responding, etc.
Its total bullshit (just as real-life micro-tells are total bullshit) and the result is going to be arbitrary persecution of people singled out by what amounts to a random number generator.
"Joe, I'm really worried about my new puppy. I think he's smarter than his mom. I'm not sure if he's stealing food while she's around or if he's embezzling it behind her back.
I don't think my kid's too happy that I made him get a job this summer. Last week I heard him say I loathe this job. I'm not sure if he's angry at me or angry at the fact that it's a minimum-wage job, but he seems pretty pissed off. Thankfully, he vents his stress at the local school, which is a lot better than going postal."
Let's see if the automated email processor can parse that load of fiction correctly.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Some people's emails are 100% clear where they are planning malfeasance. Others are talking with their doctor about their OCD medicine not working. But the best are where the same person will tell two or more people about the same situation but will tell it entirely differently. They will tell their boss one thing their underlings another, a co-manager another, and possibly a co-conspirator another thing again.
It was my experience that the people who told the same "fact" multiple different ways were the most damaging to the company.
So, while this system might be able to spot people clearly up to no good, I hope they use the ML stuff to correlate damage to certain behaviours. For instance micromanagement would easily be detectable in emails and is a great way to chase away some of the top talent. I would say that detecting that would be far better than detecting some employees who are looking for a new job. If anything a bunch of underlings continuously looking for new jobs would say more about their manager than about them as individuals.
A secretary pilfering some money out of petty cash might cost the company a tiny amount like $100,000 per year. Losing a single top programmer to micromanagement could cost the company millions or more. Losing a stream of top programmers could literally cost the company everything.
is that you can take _everything_ you'd ever said to your bosses face and analyze it for trends. If you're already looking for reasons to fire people for performance here's another.
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The point of this is more to steer productivity as to prevent sabotage.
It's a constant whip cracking over the heads of the spineless and gullible.
"Anti-sabotage" is only an excuse really.
This is double-plus-good news! I'm sure that the algorithm performs wonderfully for all people under all conditions and never misunderstands the communicative intentions of the email writers when it's blatantly obvious to the recipient and other human readers. Computers can definitely understand pragmatic human communication.
In the EU it's pretty much always illegal to read your employees' emails. Yes, privacy extends to your work emails too. There are very strict and controlled procedures under whic the employer can read your emails, and if they do, it's mandated that you be notified about it or else the employer (or former employer) is in deep waters.
The typical right-wingers in the US usually think "but they pay you, it's their fucking emails!". But no, that's not how it works here. If the employer is dumb enough to store critical business information on its employees' inboxes and not enforce the use of proper document management solutions, it's their loss. And if it's not business related (aka two employees communicating about non-business stuff), it's none of the employees business what they're talking about.
To be honest, despite all the rules and regulations we have in the EU, I feel like we got it so much better privacy wise than you guys in the US these days.
All this will result in is people being more careful about how they word their emails. Even now it is an incredibly stupid thing to rant on corporate email - it gets recorded for posterity and can be used against you at appraisal time, or get you fired.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
We had another article where another federal agency was looking for information much like this:
https://yro.slashdot.org/story...
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
So you can sack the employees before they do anything wrong
Hi! It looks like you are angry. Perhaps you are in a fragile state of mind and would like to kill everybody. Would you like some assistance with that? Oh, by the way, I read that your colleagues hate you, your boss is about to fire you, your girlfriend is sleeping with your best friend, and your parents never wanted you.
Human Rights, Article 12: Freedom from Interference with Privacy, Family, Home and Correspondence
Let's combat the symptom, not the cause. If people are unhappy with their work conditions, we must expunge them before they become a nuisance. Get back to work you drones.
Assuming y'all are stuck w/ Outlook at work, set your default to Rich Text. Then write a few lines of horrificness into your signature, and format them as white text.
Nobody but the algorithm will see it.
Yes, yes, I know that everyone who reads your mail as plaintext will too. It's just a dang joke, 'mkay?
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
This doesn't bother me at all. I'm sure that my employer would see that I have the complete confidence in management and enthusiasm for our mission.
If management can't talk to their employee's and open an intimate dialogue about what is pissing them off about the company or why they might leave and have to resort to an e-mail-and-IM-reading AI to tell them, then either
A: They live in an ivory tower and are screwing over every last plebeian they have.
B: They are completely incompetent and have surrounded themselves with a bunch of whiny brats sold on a get-rich-quick scheme.
C: They have a thin skin and aren't cut out for management. If you cannot handle verbal abuse by other people and can't get some basic social skills (even if the employee is 100% full of horse manure and will never change, buy them a bottle of their favorite alcoholic beverage or something) you don't need to be in management.
You really cannot make this garbage up. This is another reason not to use e-mail.
Also, $100k is not a tiny amount of cash to embezzle.
I would love to see this run against the Linux mailing lists to see its assessment of Torvalds. That would have to be comedy gold.