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.

Comments

it also works in reverse

[epine]

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.

At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name). ... For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the stormy applause, rising to an ovation, continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin.

However, who would dare to be the first to stop? ... After all, NKVD men were standing in the hall applauding and watching to see who would quit first! And in the obscure, small hall, unknown to the leader, the applause went on — six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn't stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly — but up there with the presidium where everyone could see them?

The director of the local paper factory, an independent and strong-minded man, stood with the presidium. Aware of all the falsity and all the impossibility of the situation, he still kept on applauding! Nine minutes! Ten! In anguish he watched the secretary of the District Party Committee, but the latter dared not stop. Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers! And even then those who were left would not falter ...

Then, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved!

The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel. That, however, was how they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different. But after he had signed Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him:

"Don't ever be the first to stop applauding."

Once known, becomes completely useless

[gweihir]

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.

Not necessarily bad

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: Not necessarily bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Why bother trying to write an interesting comment that might spur on discussion when it's going to quickly be hit with a -1? This system isn't necessarily going to be used for evil purposes and the heuristics might have a lot of interesting applications. Personal assistants like Cortana and Siri might be able to detect a person's mood and interact with the person accordingly, which is actually useful. It's also a hell of a lot more interesting than the paranoid fear mongering in most of these comments.

Slashdot is a cesspool of hypocrisy. Users don't like systems that censor speech and promote conformity, yet moderation does exactly that. If you post a dissenting view, especially as an AC, you're likely to rapidly be hit with a -1 regardless of the actual merits of your post. Those who participate fully and log in also get karma feedback, which influences their ability to moderate. It promotes groupthink, which is one of the reasons I refuse to fully participate and stick to being an AC. Moderation is pretty useless to distinguish good posts from bad ones and metamoderation is broken. Too many blatantly racist trolls get modded up while good posts get modded down, so clearly bad moderators aren't getting filtered out. However, as a system to promote groupthink, moderation actually functions quite effectively.

Sadly, the nerds who would have discussed other applications of this system and how it works have long since departed Slashdot. It's been taken over by the tinfoil hat crowd. Conform to the paranoia or be censored. Resistance is futile.

Business Email Etiquette 101:

[TigerPlish]

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"

Legal dept will advise them differently

[nehumanuscrede]

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.

Re:Who is talking about "accusations"?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a complete and utter cretin, or an absolute tool. It's not really worth it to discern which.

Many of the people who are scathing about poor internal processes are exactly those people who are positioned to, and capable of, effecting change in an organization. If they are not permitted to discuss the areas that are wrong, the tactics necessary to navigate a block, and bounce their ideas off other colleagues who they know will not react hysterically at internal communications that wouldn't pass the marketing department, then the business will flounder all the faster.

Agreed. Certainly it is simpler to work with employees that will accept anything, no matter how ridiculous, and keep trying to do their job without complaint, but that just means the problems are masked not eliminated. So you have major structural problems, but everyone who was willing to give a damn or even point them out is gone. At best the company is running significantly below the efficiency it should be, and that alone can be enough to mean its eventual collapse, when forced to compete with a competitor without those issues. Heck the main reason I'm at least looking at other jobs is to find a company that actually really believes in people, not processes.

Completely Irrelevant

[Anonymous Coward]

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.