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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.
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?
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 don't need a drug addict.
You just need a guy with a red stapler.
--
BMO
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