I can just see the HR dept calling someone down to give the lecture about "your blood pressure's been up, you need to take your meds, see a doctor, whatever and implying that otherwise they'll have to double-think if you can still your job. And that applies to just about every physical/pyscho/social metric. I don't like this at all.
first when I worked for cat they where doing this crap manualy, we had a assined staff nutrianolist, and trainer...had to keep a food diary..exct ect. so its been done before. hell one place Iworked our badges where in office GPS systems. got nasty notes if you where at someones desk or in the can too long. Lots of place have true spyware installed on all systems so they can watch what your computer is doing.
I learned to avoid the paranoid compnaies
on the other hand this will be run by tech geeks. we are some of the laziast MF's you have ever met...a lot of these systems wil get monky wrenched (right now if i want to play FF at work I jsut find the league that security is in and join that site...its never blocked or logged.)
remember to be a programmer one can't just be lazy, one must be stupidly lazy 
. douglas adams had a wonerful discription of the mindset in last chance to see. i will see if i can dig it up.
And leave us not mention how this could impact company health insurance and how it's managed. They'd have a rolling data trail on your health that they could refer to for hinest consideration of your well-being as well as brass-tacks benefits bean-counting.
Something else to think about...
“honest” consideration, that is.
LowerManhattanite when cat pulled this stuff it was bacuse they where self insured. comapny doctors and everything.
not sure if its still tath way, ran form the great yellow god a decade ago or so.
Well, the Powers seem intent on forcing all of us to work two or three jobs as the economy slides further into oblivion, so it makes sense that they'd want the bosses to keep track of you every second you're supposed to be producing.
What's next? A cranial USB port that locks you to your computer so you have to ask permission to eat or take a dump?
The Wanderer: in office gps, nasty grams and what not if you where in the bathroom too long...its allready happened. handed them a doctors note the first time. threatend a disabilities act suit the second. You probably don't want more details.
MS has workers whose whole job is to think up possible patentable item, search the patent databases to see if it's new then file a patent on it if it isn't. That's hundreds of patents a year. They are necessarily developing this but instead are patent squatting. They are betting someone else will come up with a similar idea, and develop it, at which point MSy will step in and file an infringement suit or buy them out.
"At work the other day, I went to the Men's Room and found myself at the sink finishing up."
"No knobs to turn. Just that small “Hal 9000”-ish light near the faucet for the electric eye motion-sensor that prompts the water."
"Couldn't get the damn thing to go."
-"What are you doing, Manhattanite?"
"Went down to the next sink. Same thing. Got down to the fourth sink and finally got the water to run. By this time, there were two other co-workers futilely “Ed Norton” pantomining to get the other sinks to work as I had been."
“This one works.” I said."
“Jesus Christ.” one of them said. “Half the time I come in here, I can't get the water to work with these...things. I have trouble with a faucet with knobs on it maybe...one time out of ten. Can't even wash my hands. Ridiculous.”
"I'm sorry, but you are affecting the harmony of the collecti...uh, employees.
ZAP!
"You've killed him!"
"Finish up, Manhattanite."
This will wind up weakening corporate power instead of strengthening it.
Cube farm workers will want to opt out of this regime as much as possible. Because a lot of cube farmers could do their work anywhere, we will have a trend of people opting to work on a contract basis, where they are paid for what they produce and not for time they put in. A company's most productive workers would be the first to request this -- to telecommute and be paid for their production, and not for maintaining their heart rate and metabolism at a certain rate while they toil in a cube farm. Companies will have to either stop using this Microsoft system, or let their best employees go to their competitors, or let their most productive employees become "consultants."
Among the implications: People who are underwater on their houses, and therefore can't sell their homes and move, will have newfound job mobility via telecommuting. But most important, people will demand -- and I mean demand -- single-payer health coverage.
I think all of these things are foreseeable consequences of widespread deployment of this software. I'm not sure it's all that terrible.
Yet another unworkable idea from Microsoft management.
This is going to pan out like Vista. No, worse than Vista. And that's saying something.
I'm waiting for the first lawsuit to develop that gets a person fired because of this monitoring and the company's computer monitoring systems are found to be crawling with malware.
Or worse, having someone come up with files with 'fake' data to coerce you to do something you don't want to do. "Ma'am/sir, according to our monitoring files you seem to have come to work impaired...however...if you wish to keep your job..." And so on and so forth.
Like we don;t have enough problems in the workplace. Obviously some folks have forgotten the concept of the term 'going postal'...
LM, GMTA...
Just looking at the stuff that's coming through my feedreader, and I'm hearing the 'Terminator' theme music loud and clear... unfortunately, we can't all just run down to Mexico.
Guess the PTB have eliminated the fourth amendment as well...
This is absolute craziness... I agree with Queequeg. This will be the beginning of the end for Corps, if this actually goes through. If it's not, the price for German Shepherds is gonna go sky-high :->!!
Head of the monitoring department:
'hmm, he seems not well. let's check his medical history and figure out if perhaps he is sick - we need to move quick because if he is, we need to find a quick legalese to fire him...'
Tremendously fucking stupid. Ignore the fact that physiological norms for a human in the office may vary widely -- maybe some people work well because they're anxious. Ignore the fact that false postives will abound; who can say that it's not the medication your on in this drug-addled day and age that's causing what management considers to be an anomoly.
This could easily be -- nope, scratch that, will easily be used as a dodge for discrimination. Get the person whose color or gender you hate in your office, use a mundane or nonoffensive pretext to raise his blood pressure, and send him back to his desk and watch the numbers suggest the employee is "anxious." I can garauntee you that the owners won't be conducting hundreds of trials to establish physiological baselines for workers in a variety of circumstances, and they sure as fuck won't establish baselines for individual workers. This data wouldn't mean shit even in the hands of a skilled physiologist without appropriate context, and I garauntee you no business is springing for those. This is just an excuse to manipulate workers, not observe them. This is raw power.
The problem isn't computerization. The anecdote LM mentioned was a bit mistaken. Computerization isn't the problem with the washroom faucets. The problem is shortsighted implementation and idiotic cost-cutting. But in the specific case of monitoring devices, the issue is banal powerlust. The innaccuracies of the system are features.
Umm - correct me if I'm wrong, but won't this pseudo-wetware actually weed out the hyper Type-A stress-freaks that often wind up being the MOST productive workers?
If so, you're NOT going to see much of an interest in this in any company worth a rat's ass. The bottom line rules, & always will. This looks like a very pricy pain in the butt, with little if ANY tangible upside. Shareholders aren't copacetic with stuff that impacts the value of their shares in a bad way. I think they want more value, not more mediocrity. Not to mention the distinct possibility of shareholders DIVESTING from companies that pull this kind of shit on their workers, from sheer disgust - a spinoff that's VERY uncool if you're the CFO. All the more so in an impending bear market.
Oh, & you can just BET it'll be getting seriously hacked to smithereens whenever & wherever it raises its repulsive head. Phony heart attacks, phony deaths, phony intoxications ... oh my MY, what fun for phreaks! I can almost hear them panting.
At the risk of overstating a bit, if anyone ever comes anywhere near me with this sort of gear, I'll beat them to death with the nearest computer monitor.
All though, I do see this sort of thing inspiring many a Dilbert cartoon, so maybe there is an upside.
"Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated."
Actually, I suspect Jim is correct.
There are a number of "ethical invester funds" that don't put their money into various companies that do military work or anti-union. Perhaps share holders may may insist that these funds boycott microserf stock.
Also if lie detector results are not admissable in a court room, I would think that one could then make the case that the information from this kind of monitoring shouln't be used in firing someone.
If you don't have anything to hide you won't have any problems with this. This is just like the FBI listening in on telephone calls, if you have nothing to hide why are you complaining? Or is it that you complainers have something to hide in your work?
Work is a privilege and your employer has the right to observe your work habits at what ever level they need to do.
(Laughs and ducks because he knows that the Republicans will use that logic when this technology becomes an issue.)
I immediately see some pissed-off 21-year old hacking the system so that it looks like half of the employees have dropped dead.
I wonder whether the idiot genius who came up with this ever read Snow Crash? (Which can be argued to be a public release of the idea. 102b statuatory bar. Otherwise, I can probably argue for a 103 obvious rejection.)
I work in a hospital and those fucking things are everywhere. For obvious infection control reasons, obviously, but I swear they think I'm a ghost. I wash my hands dozens of times a day and my interaction usually goes like this: finish procedure and bid adieu to patient, turn to use sink....no water. My actions quickly escalate to wild hand waving in front of the sensor and getting ready to smash it to fucking bits. I give up and as I turn to leave to go the public washroom which, strangely, has taps...a 2 second squirt of water comes out. Just to mock me. There's probably a guy sitting in a room somewhere pushing a button laughing his ass off.
Fucking technology. Progress my ass.
this stuff is all kinds of icky- makes working for a small business, or yourself look better and better.
Heh, heh, I never thought I'd ever see DEATHLOK here at the Group News Blog. Must be another comic fan in da house!
grumpy realist,
Not just Snow Crash, this sort of idea has been knocking around Science Fiction for years.
Queen of Angels and Slant by Greg Bear come to mind. I know there are others but title and author fail to come to mind.
Queequeg up there at 1.18.08 2:50 pm, I think you might have missed something when you speculated that cube farmers would turn to telecommute consulting and knock this technology on its head.
There's nothing to stop a company that would use this tech on its employees using it on its consultants, is there? Consultants already operate under various restrictions as conditions of the contract, such as non-disclosure agreements, non-competition clauses, sometimes insurance against screw-ups, and so on. (You never know what it's going to be; companies can get paranoid about the strangest things.)
Some consultants would accept this monitoring, some wouldn't. It all depends on how badly you need the work. And if you're just starting out, say, if you were a one-time cube farmer freshly turned "consultant", you might not have either the experience or the cussedness to tell the company to (a) amend its terms or (b) go to hell.
As for technology roadblocks, well, telecommuting's no obstacle. If you can hook someone up at their desk, you can hook them up through the Internet, assuming the hackers Jim mentioned could be somehow kept at bay.
All of this to say that, unfortunately, I could see it working even given the scenario you suggested.
Queequeg: careful what you wish for. as i tell the dopes at my office all teh time...don't push the tellecomuting. if you can work from home, you can work from banglor.
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