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Are Google and Facebook Surveilling Their Own Employees? (theguardian.com)
The Guardian just ran an article titled " 'They'll squash you like a bug': how Silicon Valley keeps a lid on leakers," which begins with the story of an employee confronted by Facebook's secretive "rat-catching" team:
They had records of a screenshot he'd taken, links he had clicked or hovered over, and they strongly indicated they had accessed chats between him and the journalist, dating back to before he joined the company. "It's horrifying how much they know," he told the Guardian, on the condition of anonymity... "You get on their bad side and all of a sudden you are face to face with Mark Zuckerberg's secret police"... One European Facebook content moderator signed a contract, seen by the Guardian, which granted the company the right to monitor and record his social media activities, including his personal Facebook account, as well as emails, phone calls and internet use. He also agreed to random personal searches of his belongings including bags, briefcases and car while on company premises. Refusal to allow such searches would be treated as gross misconduct...
Some employees switch their phones off or hide them out of fear that their location is being tracked. One current Facebook employee who recently spoke to Wired asked the reporter to turn off his phone so the company would have a harder time tracking if it had been near the phones of anyone from Facebook. Two security researchers confirmed that this would be technically simple for Facebook to do if both people had the Facebook app on their phone and location services switched on. Even if location services aren't switched on, Facebook can infer someone's location from wifi access points.
The article cites a 2012 report that Microsoft read a French blogger's Hotmail account to identify a former employee who had leaked trade secrets. And it also reports that tech companies hire external agencies to surveil their employees. "One such firm, Pinkerton, counts Google and Facebook among its clients." Though Facebook and Google both deny this, "Among other services, Pinkerton offers to send investigators to coffee shops or restaurants near a company's campus to eavesdrop on employees' conversations...
Al Gidari, consulting director of privacy at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, says that these tools "are common, widespread, intrusive and legal."
Some employees switch their phones off or hide them out of fear that their location is being tracked. One current Facebook employee who recently spoke to Wired asked the reporter to turn off his phone so the company would have a harder time tracking if it had been near the phones of anyone from Facebook. Two security researchers confirmed that this would be technically simple for Facebook to do if both people had the Facebook app on their phone and location services switched on. Even if location services aren't switched on, Facebook can infer someone's location from wifi access points.
The article cites a 2012 report that Microsoft read a French blogger's Hotmail account to identify a former employee who had leaked trade secrets. And it also reports that tech companies hire external agencies to surveil their employees. "One such firm, Pinkerton, counts Google and Facebook among its clients." Though Facebook and Google both deny this, "Among other services, Pinkerton offers to send investigators to coffee shops or restaurants near a company's campus to eavesdrop on employees' conversations...
Al Gidari, consulting director of privacy at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, says that these tools "are common, widespread, intrusive and legal."
In my college days I worked nights as a Pinkerton and even made sergeant, but I'm also surprised that they retained (or revived?) the name after the sale of the company. I believe the buyer was Wackenhut? Though I wasn't involved in any "actions" involving labor unions, I know the company was historically heavily involved in protecting scabs and otherwise working to bust unions. In my doddering maturity, I think we need balance between the interests of labor and management and that many of America's problems are due to the increasing imbalance... My memories on this part of the history are fuzzier, but I believe the original founders of the agency were two brothers who did a lot of bounty hunting.
Anyway, my ancient experiences are obviously obsolete. Pinkerton certainly had no computer-related skills or expertise in those days.
In my more recent experiences at the shadowy ghost of IBM, I saw plenty of evidence of intrusive but mostly ineffectual monitoring of what employees were doing. They were slightly diplomatic in that they would give you some subtle warnings and it was easy enough to figure out what to stop doing. Most of the explicit guidelines seemed quite reasonable to me, though some of the monitoring software also crippled the employees' machines in significant ways. That was in addition to the anti-virus and configuration remote control software, but the managers never asked about how much efficiency we lost in struggles with the automated configurations and re-configurations.
Trying to figure out if I have any conclusion to offer... I guess it would be that demotivated employees were the largest problem I saw, but I might be projecting. I don't think I was ever demotivated enough to be motivated to actual industrial espionage, but if it had gotten to that point I sure wouldn't say so on Slashdot, would I? (As things actually turned out, I got too old and was sent to the farm upstate to play with the other puppies. But I can't say I wasn't in a race condition at the end.)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.