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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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Just walk into any healthcare facility in the US. Panopticon ain't in it. We've got cameras monitoring cameras and locks protecting locked drawers.
In college I worked for a large aviation company as a summer intern in a high security facility. It was more relaxed than the little hospital I work in presently. I just wish they would let us review the feeds so I could figure out where I left my glasses.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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!
No, you need counseling.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
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.
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.
Already the most hated company in America, is comcast trying to create some kind of hatred singularity?
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
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.
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