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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."
The workers must rule.
Right, that worked very well in Eastern Europe.
We need stronger privacy laws, nothing else. Keep your communism in the USSR please.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
In addition to the new "Big Brother know best" observation system, the beatings will continue until morale improves.
And you will need to rent Comcast internet hardware to make use of this. Yes if you want comcast business internet static ip you must rent there gateway on top of the static ip fee.
Just think... Having video of all your trade secrets spilled out to some anonymous site including audio when the hack the camera to enable it.
Here's an idea for you:
1) Start a retail business.
2) Get robbed by someone who walks in the front door. Or,
3) Have one of your employees attack another one. Or,
4) Have one of your employees get hooked on heroin and start to steal your inventory.
I'm guessing your solution to getting to the bottom of such things is to hire people to stand around watching everything so they can testify based on their recollections of events later, in a trial. Because you sure wouldn't want what happens on your own property with your own inventory with your the people you pay money to be there doing things to be recorded. Until you really, really do because real life is different when you start paying a fortune in insurance as part of running a business. Or find yourself in court. Or are running out of money because of inventory shrinkage, or have to know which of your very good employees is totally innocent of what one of your rotten employees has been setting them up to look guilty for.
But yeah, I can see why you'd advocate violence against a vendor offering a service you can choose to ignore if it's not useful to you.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
We can use this facility for police bodycams, right? You know, the ones that seem to consistently "lose" footage at convenient (critical) times?
You must be a member of one of the older generations.
We do work. We work our asses off, and in many cases in more than one job or while trying to get an education. We don't get paid much because that would cut into the companies profits, but how much we get paid is not a a good measurement of labor put in. It hasn't been for years, not since company execs decided that paying a living wage to their employees was wasting their money.
I take it "do their part" is defined as "work backbreaking labor, for less than it costs to pay the cheapest foreign worker to do the job" right? That's the problem. We can't work for those wages like that and keep a roof over our heads. Company execs, wall street, and government idiots, all like to think that their wage cuts, off-shoring, use of H1B visas, company mergers, and layoffs occur in a small insignificant bubble that won't have any consequences on the economy, or that others won't do the same thing to their employees. In reality however, the effect snowballs and the result is less decent paying jobs for American workers, less spending money on the average American consumer (that's bad in a services economy btw), a greater risk of Americans not being able to pay their bills, higher inflation, and less overall opportunity for Americans.
Even with healthy work ethics, paying a person to do a job less than than the amount it takes to pay their monthly bills is not sustainable. Anyone with a healthy work ethic can tell you that, the problem is that's the only option a lot of people have.
So in other words, you're someone who thinks that unless everyone else does what you tell them to do, they are unworthy of a job. Taken to the extreme, that means we can't be paid enough to pay our bills because you deem it so. ("Well I demanded they work for 9 hours for minimum wage, or face unemployment. Why would I pay them enough to pay their bills when that money can buy me another set of golf clubs instead?") That's the problem, you can't be satisfied regardless of what anyone else does.
That works both ways buddy. I'd think the majority would decide (eventually) to put limits on just how little you can pay them relative to the cost of living, or outright subsidize that cost.
That's the problem with Capitalism and Globalization. Companies can outsource their labor to the cheapest worker they can find, but the laborers can't outsource their minimal cost of living. If you don't tie the minimum wage to the cost of living adjusted for inflation, and put meaningful limits on the amount of outsourcing a company can do while participating in your economy, the result in a Capitalist society is: The value of the people's labor drops too low to keep them or their communities going, they wind up not being able to work enough to make up for the difference, and their economy slows to a crawl before collapsing under it's own weight due to the amount of debt piling up.
Given the options, you shouldn't expect that society will go along with it's own destruction for long.
That's hardly a "no true Scotsman" case. A claim was made that workers once ruled Eastern Europe and that it didn't work out. That simple fact is that the former never happened, rendering the latter nonsensical. No Scotsmen were mentioned.
Ezekiel 23:20