We were half joking last week when we suggested that, in many cases in tech, so-called terms of service be renamed ‘terms of servitude.’ Given the amount of data scraping and surveillance we’ve seen because of the lockdowns (think the enormous spike in Amazon and Walmart online orders, while mom and pops were forced to close). It’ll be interesting to see what fresh hell comes next. The New Normal? Might want to think New Police State.

Or something like that.

 

It seems we’ve moved beyond mere Surveillance Capitalism. Case in point: Big Tech call center workers face pressure to accept home surveillance  Workers at one of the world’s largest call center companies said additional monitoring would violate the privacy of their families in their homes, NBC News reported. “(Employees of) Teleperformance, one of the world’s largest call center companies, which counts Apple, Amazon and Uber among its clients, said that… the contract allows monitoring by AI-powered cameras in workers’ homes, voice analytics and storage of data collected from the worker’s family members, including minors. Teleperformance employs more than 380,000 workers globally.”

“Surveillance at home has really been normalized in the context of the pandemic,” said Veena Dubal, a labor law professor at the University of California, Hastings. “Companies see a lot of benefit in putting in software to do all kinds of monitoring they would have otherwise expected their human managers to do, but the reality is that it’s much more intrusive than surveillance conducted by a boss.”

 

What to speak of the fact that, just last month we reported that In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for three hours, according to Inc, which also observed that the eight-hour workday is a remnant from the Industrial Age. So if, say, tech employees are to be monitored the way call center employees currently are, given that they’re likely to be productive more hours rather than less, does that mean that their salaries will increase along with their increased productivity? This just in: Google Employees Face Pay Cuts Up To 25% For Working From Home Permanently: Leaked Salary Data.

The house always wins.

 

Then again, French President Emmanuel Macron Says Showing Police Your Papers to Visit a Cafe is About “Freedom”. “Despite the fact that the French haven’t experienced such an intense ‘papers please’ society since the Nazi occupation, President Macron insisted that vaccine passports were about protecting people’s ‘freedom,’” Summit News reports.

 

Elsewhere in surveillance, Amazon Uses Artificial Intelligence To Terminate Delivery Drivers. “At the world’s largest e-commerce retailer, algorithms are the boss, hiring and firing and monitoring hundreds of thousands of workers with hardly any human oversight… But many of these drivers say the algorithms don’t factor in real-world problems for failing to deliver a package on time, such as traffic, locked buildings, vehicle troubles, among other things.”

An appeal costs the driver $200, and we know how well Amazon pays.

Can an algorithm tell if a building is locked? Maybe it should have been the programmer who lost his/her job rather than the driver. #Fail.

 

Is Surveillance Capitalism morphing into Surveillance Totalitarianism?

 

We have a health app on our phone that, among other things, monitors how many steps we take a day, comparing it to the week/month/year before. A few months back, our phone noted that we were taking far fewer steps than we did at that time the week/month/year before. Our phone also has a weather app. If it were truly a smart phone, it might have noted that we were taking fewer steps, as two blizzards had hit, delivering at least two feet of snow, and the outside temperatures were in negative numbers, factoring in wind chill. Not having a death wish, of course we’d walked fewer steps. Did our health suffer? We weren’t lost in a snow drift and are frostbite-free. So much for algos and Big Data and what’s truly healthy.

 

Our suggestion: the designers/programmers of the Amazon AI should be made to drive the trucks for several weeks so that they can factor events that take place in the real world into their algorithms. No one is perfect – and neither are many of the current algorithms, it seems.

 

Marc Andreessen once very famously said that Software is Eating the World and was hailed a visionary.  But it was Peter Thiel, who said that “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters,” who was truly prescient.

Given the growing restrictions on our freedoms and the ever-increasing intrusion of tech into our most private of lives, software may be eating the world but thanks to the dictates of the few, it seems to us that there are roughly 140 characters running it. Onward and forward.