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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.
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.
also have maximum security...or at least the max affordable
In addition to the new "Big Brother know best" observation system, the beatings will continue until morale improves.
This is completely unacceptable, unethical, immoral, and it cannot be allowed to spread.
What more would you expect from Comcast?
Democracy, the workers are the majority, the workers must rule. A government of the workers, by the workers and for the workers. I might not agree with everything real democracy produces but I do accept it because I do truly value the worth of Democracy. The workers must rule they are the majority, suck it up! My religion, Freedom, Democracy and Justice, more than just an empty belief or motto. Nobody expects the global democratic reformation https://www.youtube.com/watch?... that's what it will feel like for the rich and greedy and for the rest of us, the majority, it will be justice and rather humorous to boot.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
does the equipment have outlet / renting fees? Knowing Comcast they may just do that + lock you into a 2-3 year deal as well.
high definition is now only 720p at comcast! I can buy my own 1080P ones for under $100 each.
to pay for lights, the nightvision sounds attractive to my employer. It sucks working Seattle Hundreds (16 hours a day Mon-Thur and 12 hours a day Fri-Sun) in a dim office.
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.
At my company everyone (including former remote employees) just sit at team tables. We take all breaks (including bathroom breaks) together, and always go to lunch together. I really doubt we need such a service.
I work with a bunch of right wingers that flip out over stuff like this, but if the government contacted us about doing contract camera installs in people's bedrooms, they would be sitting around working on quotes and figuring up profit margins and commissions. I guess we all have our price.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
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.
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.
Give them a decent paycheck so they actually have something to lose if they get fired?
Does the bandwidth used by uploading and downloading video count against any of your data caps or ratings? If not, would similar video streams from a competing service count?
Too bad it isn't to upgrade the infrastructure for the cash cow of residential customers. It's to build out a system for a solution in search of a problem.
The more you know.
I mean, if you've got full surveillance of the workplace, then a camera can be looking at you keyboard as you type the password.
So what do you do instead of passwords? Biometrics? Some kind of plug-in token? Does Comcast get the business for your conversion of that too?
Or are the employees supposed to hunch over and shield the keyboard with their bodies when typing in passwords?
Who's taking bets on how long before some company is seriously compromised by this?
A thousand pounds of wood moving at 300 feet per minute. Don't get in the way.
So now we have a level of people who spend all their time watching other people working (or faking it), but the obvious new job opportunity is to get a job watching the guys who are watching the other guys.
It's the ultimate in job security, because they'll always need to hire someone at the next level up!
Unbounded recursion? Resources exhausted? Whatever do you mean?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Bad customer support?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
They usually want point of sale integration too - so they can look at "no sale" cash drawer openings.
Nullius in verba
Are they trying to win some kind of evil award of something?
Google got a lot of milage from "Don't Be Evil".
Maybe Comcast is trying for a shorter, edgier theme in view of more apocalyptic flavor of recent events : Be Evil.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Yes, well, why are steps 2, 3, and 4 even a thing? We don't have a society, we don't have a culture of honesty and dignity, and no amount of techno-crap will ever make up for that. And if you think that this 'product' is a 'solution' to some sort of 'problem', well, your head is somewhere awkward.
As long as I'm one of the elite classes that tells the others what to do.
Why would you run a business without an insurance?
Who suggested that? But why would pay far more for your insurance than you need to? You can hugely mitigate those costs by having a decent security system. Which you know, but are pretending you don't.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Those same people will tell you they didn't steal anything because they were "perqs" of the job. But let their underlings take a half pencil home and they go berserk. They are the Elites so they have the RIGHT to their perqs. The Peons who work for them have no rights in their eyes.
Hire me! Hire me!
I love hard work!
I could watch it all day!
But seriously folks, I mostly enjoyed my work and didn't even want to retire when the big three-letter-company was done with me. Looking at the developing situation, now I think I got out just in time.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
So, not the person who originally posted, but someone coming from 20+ years in the US workforce across a half dozen industries.
If someone making six figures steals a $20 widget every week, you're losing $1000/year, or about 1% of your personnel cost. If it costs you more than $1000/year to fix that, it's a bad idea to fix, as long as it's not getting worse.
You'd have to buy or build a way to catch them, build the process to reprimand and then fire them, hire additional HR personnel to run the whole thing, and you're occasionally firing or demoralizing some of your better employees. If you lose three months of productivity while you're looking for a replacement, that's $25k of productivity gone, $5k+ spent on recruiters to find new people, losing a few dozen hours of the rest of your staff to interview candidates, and then 3-6 months of full pay before they're fully useful ($25-50k)...
The cost to an organization of firing a $100k employee is between $50-150k. If they steal $20/week for fifty years, it's still cheaper to just ignore, at the very least. What they're doing is unethical, but kind of a cost of doing (efficient) business.
We can use this facility for police bodycams, right? You know, the ones that seem to consistently "lose" footage at convenient (critical) times?
Replying to my own thread on this one; if you find an employee stealing the *same* $20 item every week? Hell, turn it into a free perk.
Employees who think their employers give a damn do at least twice the work in the same amount of time. If you're going to spend the money (and you probably should anyways), get them to work harder for it.
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.
So it's not about businesses using intrusive technology to enforce time and asset management. It's about police increasing surveillance and push-button policing while businesses socialize their time and asset management expenses.
You don't need a drug addict.
You just need a guy with a red stapler.
--
BMO
This just reeks of micromanagement.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The problem is, there is zero probability that this new corporate surveillance will be aimed at IT directors.
Because if there's one thing we've learned, it's that if you are rich and you steal, it's considered, "smart". If you're making $35k/yr and you make an unauthorized copy of your tax return on a company xerox machine, you're going to get frog-marched out of the place.
Late-stage capitalism is a cancer.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Productivity is at an all-time high. This is one reason why people can't find jobs: work that used to take several people is now being done by one, and that one suffers in silence just glad to have a job. And they can see the line of applicants at the door.
So what crack is Comcast smoking? Maybe their cameras can tell them where to get it.
Here's the thing: any business desperately threatened without cameras A) already knows it, and B) almost certainly already has cameras in place. Cameras have been cheap for a while and easy to setup and monitor. Anyone who wants to go nuts putting in cameras can do so, and watch them from across the globe.
The problem is, all the cameras you can install have not stopped shrinkage (employee theft) or really stopped other crimes, and there is scant evidence they have encouraged people to work harder. Everybody who wants to steal figures out ways to do it that the cameras can't see. And people who goof off or whatever will always goof off.
And if you really DO install cameras and follow what Comcast suggests for doing live remote monitoring or storing footage online and so forth, exactly WHO is going to watch all of this amazing footage? In most offices or businesses, nobody has time to be a camera operator. And the regular managers already have jobs, managing, and when they go home, they don't want to sit there having to watch cameras.
So Comcast is selling a solution for a problem that they cannot actually fix, and instead of improving productivity as they claim, it really means some sucker will have to endure watching hours of nothing trying desperately to find something exciting worthy of Youtube if not LiveLeak, and for 99%+ of of these cameras, they will see nothing at all.
But hey Comcast can charge them big $$ for it. Every month. Promising something exciting will happen and Comcast will be there to help you see it!
BULLSHIT
Sig for hire.
Already the most hated company in America, is comcast trying to create some kind of hatred singularity?
I'm a little surprised that they didn't form a new division and give it a different name for this product. I don't think that the "we surveil people for money" notion is going to help their cable internet business. Granted, much of that is in locations where they have a monopoly, but still. Now if municipalities want to fight with them they can say "regardless of whether they're spying on non-business customers, too many of our community members are convinced that they do - we have to provide a municipal alternative for their peace of mind."
I know the perfect place to implement this service: The White House. I'm sure the American people would like to ensure that they are getting the highest levels of productivity there...
Seattle is a mere 46 deg N
London is 51 deg N
Edinburgh is 55.9 deg N (400 miles N of London)
We don't have the 'Seattle disease' here. If anything, the offices are far too brightly lit.
Don't complain about the high lattitude of US cities unless they are in Alaska.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
An absolutely huge benefit for sole proprietorships with no employees. Now i'll be able to find where the hell i put my car keys MUCH easier.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Right, that worked very well in Eastern Europe.
How would you know, considering that they have actually never ruled there yet?
Ezekiel 23:20
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
cameras with microphones in the ceiling that covered the whole workspace, as managers we were allowed into the office for 45 mins in morning and at end of day for paperwork and email correspondence, otherwise the office was supposed to be empty with everyone doing field work. South Carolina is one of those wonderful "work at will" states, so I willed myself to work elsewhere....
I can see why American businesses would want to monitor their employees for insurance purposes, not only to try and prevent slaking off. With all the ambulance chasers, sexual harassment lawsuit, firing related lawsuits, etc., makes sense. If the laws are such that the employer can be taken to court just to try and get money out of an employer, this service can provide some level of protection by presenting some type of evidence that may quickly prove many allegations to be lies.
You can't handle the truth.
I have. And you know why?
Because there were no cameras in the manager's office, just 3 of them aimed at the cashier and two on the beer fridge.
Brand new manager walked in and turned us from an A store to a C- on profit losses even though our sales had actually gone up.
Two months later when corporate got involved, there were 3 high-rez color cameras aimed at the cash and the beer-fridge circuit was untouched. We cashiers could not be trusted with the deposits we never stole, because after we'd make the triple-checked and camera-verified deposit into that pneumatic tube the money would sometimes disappear which would be marked on our personal balance because we're thieves.
The money kept disappearing well after I got fired for the thefts.
I see a lot of people putting the "big brother" spin on this and talking about watching employees. I certainly agree that watching your employees' every move accomplishes nothing.
On the other hand, if you run a business like a gas station, convenience store, fast food restaurant, etc then watching the public areas and the outside of business with cameras is a good idea. As for who monitors the footage, that's simple: there's no need to monitor it 24/7. Just review it when you need to (ie if something happened).
Normally, I'd happily jump on the Comcast bashing train. But as they like to tout, their ability to put together a turnkey solution has helped attract more business to the Green Light program here in Detroit. There are other components to the program besides the surveillance (ie increased lighting, and visible signage that they are a part of the program). All together, it makes customers feel safer at their business, and discourages troublemakers.
Some people are put off by the additional surveillance and the idea that the police can see them, but others like the feeling of safety and are more willing to stop in an area where they might not otherwise. Speaking with various police officers in my area, they have admitted that while some businesses experience small drop in customers initially, things usually rebound as the businesses attract a better class of customer.
In Detroit, even with the cameras feeding to police headquarters, it isn't a 24/7 big brother scenario. Let's face it, everyone has better things to do, including the police. They're not scrutinizing the footage for every person who jaywalks or litters or "forgot" to renew their license plate. However, if something does happen at a Green Light location, the police are able to quickly access footage (and view it in realtime if the incident is still occurring) and the outcome is typically a lot better.
Imagine two scenarios:
Scenario A:
Someone is robbed at a gas station in the middle of the night. When the police arrive, all they have is the description of a person or vehicle from the victim which may not be very accurate. The next morning, the police are able to get ahold of the owner of the station and have him pull the security footage. Assuming it's even usable (ie good quality, good lighting/nigh vision), by the time the police get it the perpetrator is long gone.
Scenario B:
Someone is robbed at a gas station in the middle of the night. As the squad car is being dispatched, someone at police headquarters is able to access high-quality footage of the incident and provide a reliable description of the perpetrator and/or their vehicle to the responding officers and other officers in the area. An officer notices someone matching the description walking a few blocks from where the incident happened, stops them, and is able to make an arrest before they've had hours or days to disappear.
Great! You have a couple thousand jobs that you didn't tell anyone about, please tell the people! If you think that everyone who wants a job can get one, I'm pretty sure you can point us to them!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I found a thing better than starving.
BANG
You're dead now and don't need your wallet anymore. Hey, if the alternative is starving to death, I take my chance killing you and only MAYBE get killed for that.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The communist model didn't work for the same reason this one is failing: People want money. Not a job. The job is the necessary evil for money.
The communist model failed because people noticed that they could get money without working.
This one is failing because people are noticing that even if they were working they cannot get enough money.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Since you're basically asking for more government intervention (stronger privacy laws) to government style takeovers (e.g. Communism).
Yeah, I'm baiting you. But I'm doing it because I'm annoyed that you're instantly equating something you don't like (being monitored by a private company you work for) with something else you don't like (government telling you to do things you don't want to do).
It's something I see a _lot_ here in America. Folks are all for Government doing the things they want but if it's something their opposed to (Gun Control, Abortion legislation/regulation, paying your taxes so folks can have clean water, take your pick) they cry out oppression and demand somebody cut, cut cut that evil bureaucracy. It's hypocritical and it's one of the reasons why we can't have Nice Things (tm).
Basically, everybody wants government on their side but as soon as they have to pony up tax dollars to make it work for somebody else they're all being oppressed.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I care about productivity. It's easy enough to measure that and if this works, businesses will do it. In the few places where there's competition for workers left you won't see this crap, but for us rank and file we'll suck it down. Especially as outsourcing, H1-Bs and automation devour job opportunities in a world where quality of life is increasingly tied to your job.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
file an fcc complaint.
But with trump that may not do any thing.
Comcast CEO found to be doing NSFW activities in office by Workplace Surveillance
Comcast Cancelled Workplace Surveillance services
You think communism failed because everybody loved a life of ease without working? Uh, the "communist" (as in Soviet ) model failed because nobody could get material wealth no matter how hard they worked, and so material wealth was reserved as a reward for the Soviet 1%, who did nothing useful other than keep the 99% powerless. Sounds strangely familiar... Russia was a poor country by Western standards and productivity was low. Marx observed that societies meeting that description went into a capitalist phase where productivity and wealth increased vastly, but then fell apart because division of the wealth was to unfair. "Communism" thought they could skip that intermediate step. It never got to any stage where great masses of loafers loved off welfare, despite your odd fantasy.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Entering beta testing in 2018; employees will be automatically given negative feedback by embedded AI, based on their recorded behavioral profile, using modified Taser technology.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Studies have shown that employees who are "allowed" to steal diddly items from their employer remain content at lower salaries than those where theft is tightly controlled, the difference in salary being far more than the value of the theft. Human nature being what it is. http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/pay-...
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
At last, the meaning of the word "xfinity" is revealed.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
The idea was to oversimplify the problem to get the 5 second attention span millennials to actually listen for a change...
The problem of the communist model wasn't wellfare. It was basically what you said: No matter how hard you worked, it didn't matter. So people didn't. They took the GDR party slogan "We have to squeeze everything from our factories" to the heart and did exactly that. The consideration for the average worker was no longer how to produce more but how to get more out of it for himself. Since that wasn't possible by working more, and working less was not really punished either, people simply put up some work spectacle. Twice so when they noticed that due to the usual shortages working quickly when raw materials arrived meant not having to work at all at the end of the month when there were no raw materials left to work with.
That was, by the way, similar when the East Bloc fell and the workers were taken over by West companies. The companies were delighted to see their new workforce work with incredible zeal, which plummeted instantly once they noticed that burning through the raw materials by the 5th didn't mean slacking for the rest of the month but instead getting a new stack of raw material...
So don't worry. I know both systems. Quite intimately.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yes, but oddly there's a lot of people who want to give me everything and their soul for those oddly colored rectangular pieces of paper. And as long as they do, it has a value.
Money is a commodity like any other. Its value is not what you attribute to it but what someone else is willing to give you for it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
They did in some part of Russia before the Civil War got too horrendous...
Not content to just fuck you at home, now they fuck you in your workplace as well!
I just got a letter explaining that to service me better, they are increasing the fee they charge to re-broadcast the channels I can get for free over the air.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
I got asked if I wanted to transfer my service to a friend or family member... I'm not that evil and it hurts to think about how assholes might exist that would do this to somebody...
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?