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Comcast Launches New 24/7 Workplace Surveillance Service (philly.com)
America's largest ISP just rolled out a new service that allows small and medium-sized business owners "to oversee their organization" with continuous video surveillance footage that's stored in the cloud -- allowing them to "improve efficiency." An anonymous reader quotes the Philadelphia Inquirer:
Inventory is disappearing. Workplace productivity is off. He said/she said office politics are driving people crazy. Who you gonna call...? Comcast Business hopes it will be the one, with the "SmartOffice" surveillance offering formally launched this week in Philadelphia and across "70 percent of our national [internet] service footprint," said Christian Nascimento, executive director of premise services for the Comcast division. Putting a "Smart Cities" (rather than "Big Brother is watching you") spin on "the growing trend for...connected devices across the private and public sectors," the SmartOffice solution "can provide video surveillance to organizations that want to monitor their locations more closely," Nascimento said...
The surveillance cameras are equipped with zoom lenses, night-vision, motion detection, and wide-angle lenses, while an app allows remote access to the footage from smartphones and tablets (though the footage can also be downloaded, or stored online for up to a month). Last year Comcast was heavily involved in an effort to provide Detroit's police department with real-time video feeds from over 120 local businesses, which the mayor said wouldn't have been successful "Without the complete video technology system Comcast provides."
The surveillance cameras are equipped with zoom lenses, night-vision, motion detection, and wide-angle lenses, while an app allows remote access to the footage from smartphones and tablets (though the footage can also be downloaded, or stored online for up to a month). Last year Comcast was heavily involved in an effort to provide Detroit's police department with real-time video feeds from over 120 local businesses, which the mayor said wouldn't have been successful "Without the complete video technology system Comcast provides."
Personally I like the German approach better. No logging. None. We have swipe cards to enter the building for security reasons, when it was found that the timestamps of those cards were logged there was a huge stink about it even though as best anyone could tell no one actually ever accessed the logs. Employers are simply not allowed to monitor employees.
Now that can go too far as well since that inhibits our ability to improve processes and makes incident investigation very difficult, but it's a shitload better than what is being proposed here.
You'd think the last 100 years of this dogmatic nonsense would've taught everyone a lesson by now. Communist states typically provided the worst environments with the least incentives for workers.
Right, that worked very well in Eastern Europe.
Invalid analogy, the worked NEVER actually ruled in any Communist / Socialist Eastern Block country.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
also have maximum security...or at least the max affordable
Not exactly. The command and control mentality with corporate America is quite common. I used to work for a Fortune 100 company. Hell, I'll tell you the name. World Fuel Services. More accurately, I worked for a company that was bought by them. I eventually left of my own accord because the place had grown so toxic because of corporate, but that's another story.
After being acquired, eventually the corporate facilities guy got around to us, and insisted they install security cameras everywhere. I assure you this company was NOT minimum wage employees. This was a medium size office of under 100 people where everyone knew each other and trusted each other. We never had a theft problem ever, and the building wasn't publicly accessible. Yet the facilities guy insisted we had to have security cameras that all reported back to corporate. Nobody was happy about it, our upper management tried to fight it, but it didn't matter. The cameras went in.
So it's not just minimum wage employees that have to put up with this surveillance crap. Corporate America is still quite in love with this idea that they can control everything, and that's a good thing. Sadly, that idea isn't going to die anytime soon, and is likely expanding, not contracting.