Qhue
Tranny Chaser
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While reading over some comments on another site about how incensed people were at the idea that their shopping habits were being tracked it occurred to me that many people, most people, hell possibly nearly ALL people are ignorant as to the degree to which they are being tracked by various entities.
This is obviously the sort of thing that conspiracy-theorists vexed over for decades in the latter half of the 20th century. That the 'guvmint iz watchin yu!!' etc. The truth is that back then there just wasn't the sort of infrastructure necessary to keep track of lots of people. If the government really was keeping tabs on you then it was solely because you were the sort of person that it was a very good idea to keep tabs on... Laws were written and tight controls were put in place with respect to 'wire taps' and various other means of monitoring the public to ensure that the sort of Orwellian future predicted in '1984' never happened. The good news is that these efforts were, by and large, quite successful and the government and even law enforcement has a hard time keeping tabs on various people.
The bad news is that while we were all worried about the government we completely forgot about the robber barons and how effective capitalism is at getting shit done when there is money to be made.
This has been most famously (infamously) documented of late by workers at Amazon distribution centers : How Amazon automatically tracks and fires warehouse workers for ‘productivity’ If Workers Slack Off, the Wristband Will Know. (And Amazon Has a Patent for It.) and companies like Uber : What It’s Like to Work for an Algorithm . Responses and comments to those articles reveal the sort of shock and awe many people have over the ability for a company to do something like this and how thankful they are that it could never happen to them...
Well it can and may already have happened.
There are, in fact, a great many companies out there whose whole business model is keyed to offering employers very detailed information about what their employees are doing --
A Guide: Everything You Need to Know About Employee Monitoring
Indoor & Outdoor Tracking Solutions by infsoft
#1 Field Service Management Mobile App - allGeo
User Activity Monitoring - Teramind UAM | Teramind etc.
This includes not only tracking completion of tasks but also the ability to see what each employee is doing on their machine / phone, where they are physically located, and even what camera is most readily available to view them.
But what about all those privacy laws and protections? Well many of them are specifically limited to government-based tracking and monitoring or are functionally useless due to being inadmissable in a court of law. These say nothing about an employer monitoring an employee for their own purposes and/or the fact that you agreed to this monitoring as part of your condition of employment. Don't think you agreed to such a thing? Well you may be surprised to learn you already have thanks to intentionally vague language and/or weak privacy protections in your state. Even in cases where such protections are fairly strong it is hard to argue against the idea that the employer has every right to keep tabs on you at work... so any attempt to fight such monitoring (which would almost always be remanded to arbitration thanks to company policy) are ultimately unsuccessful.
Okay so your boss may be monitoring everything you do and everything you say. You leave all that when you walk out the door of the office right? Not necessarily. Many of these functions continue even after you have left the building. Bring your work laptop home? It continues sharing out information. Have a two-factor authorization app on your phone? Its probably reporting your location and possibly other information as well.
Obviously this doesn't end with the employer. Google and your mobile provider are always keeping track of your location and selling that info to anyone who wants it. Most retail establishments do the same thing both with free WiFi (which can very effectively track you even if you never connect to it so long as your WiFi is enabled at all) and customer loyalty apps.
Here's a fun experiment to run -- go to your grocery, especially one that has an app version of the usual loyalty card, and go to a section of the store you normally don't visit. If you don't have a pet go to the pet food aisle, if you hate seafood go stand at the fish counter for a bit. Then reinforce this by going elsewhere in the store and then go back to that location. Do this a couple times. Depending on the sensitivity you may be rewarded instantly with a coupon for a related product when you go to check out or might receive a 'just for you' mailing that includes an offer for dog food / fish / whatever. Customer loyalty isn't just tracking what you buy, and what time of the year you buy it, but where in the store you go and how that does or does not link into your spending.
The fun part is that the data is accurate enough and widely distributed enough that any attempt at anonymity is lost. Even without knowing your name is Nathan Whitman they can readily identify that device with a given MAC spends 10+ hours a day at Nathan Whitman's house, another 6+ hours a day at the place where Nathan Whitman works, and then enters Target at the same time that Target detects shopper #231414 who then goes to parts of the store that coincides with Nathan Whitman's consumer profile and then uses the self-serve kiosk where Nathan Whitman's credit card is used.
So what's the takeaway? The genie is out of the bottle and no amount of hand wringing is going to put it back. You just need to be aware of it and how this can be used to benefit you personally.
This is obviously the sort of thing that conspiracy-theorists vexed over for decades in the latter half of the 20th century. That the 'guvmint iz watchin yu!!' etc. The truth is that back then there just wasn't the sort of infrastructure necessary to keep track of lots of people. If the government really was keeping tabs on you then it was solely because you were the sort of person that it was a very good idea to keep tabs on... Laws were written and tight controls were put in place with respect to 'wire taps' and various other means of monitoring the public to ensure that the sort of Orwellian future predicted in '1984' never happened. The good news is that these efforts were, by and large, quite successful and the government and even law enforcement has a hard time keeping tabs on various people.
The bad news is that while we were all worried about the government we completely forgot about the robber barons and how effective capitalism is at getting shit done when there is money to be made.
This has been most famously (infamously) documented of late by workers at Amazon distribution centers : How Amazon automatically tracks and fires warehouse workers for ‘productivity’ If Workers Slack Off, the Wristband Will Know. (And Amazon Has a Patent for It.) and companies like Uber : What It’s Like to Work for an Algorithm . Responses and comments to those articles reveal the sort of shock and awe many people have over the ability for a company to do something like this and how thankful they are that it could never happen to them...
Well it can and may already have happened.
There are, in fact, a great many companies out there whose whole business model is keyed to offering employers very detailed information about what their employees are doing --
A Guide: Everything You Need to Know About Employee Monitoring
Indoor & Outdoor Tracking Solutions by infsoft
#1 Field Service Management Mobile App - allGeo
User Activity Monitoring - Teramind UAM | Teramind etc.
This includes not only tracking completion of tasks but also the ability to see what each employee is doing on their machine / phone, where they are physically located, and even what camera is most readily available to view them.
But what about all those privacy laws and protections? Well many of them are specifically limited to government-based tracking and monitoring or are functionally useless due to being inadmissable in a court of law. These say nothing about an employer monitoring an employee for their own purposes and/or the fact that you agreed to this monitoring as part of your condition of employment. Don't think you agreed to such a thing? Well you may be surprised to learn you already have thanks to intentionally vague language and/or weak privacy protections in your state. Even in cases where such protections are fairly strong it is hard to argue against the idea that the employer has every right to keep tabs on you at work... so any attempt to fight such monitoring (which would almost always be remanded to arbitration thanks to company policy) are ultimately unsuccessful.
Okay so your boss may be monitoring everything you do and everything you say. You leave all that when you walk out the door of the office right? Not necessarily. Many of these functions continue even after you have left the building. Bring your work laptop home? It continues sharing out information. Have a two-factor authorization app on your phone? Its probably reporting your location and possibly other information as well.
Obviously this doesn't end with the employer. Google and your mobile provider are always keeping track of your location and selling that info to anyone who wants it. Most retail establishments do the same thing both with free WiFi (which can very effectively track you even if you never connect to it so long as your WiFi is enabled at all) and customer loyalty apps.
Here's a fun experiment to run -- go to your grocery, especially one that has an app version of the usual loyalty card, and go to a section of the store you normally don't visit. If you don't have a pet go to the pet food aisle, if you hate seafood go stand at the fish counter for a bit. Then reinforce this by going elsewhere in the store and then go back to that location. Do this a couple times. Depending on the sensitivity you may be rewarded instantly with a coupon for a related product when you go to check out or might receive a 'just for you' mailing that includes an offer for dog food / fish / whatever. Customer loyalty isn't just tracking what you buy, and what time of the year you buy it, but where in the store you go and how that does or does not link into your spending.
The fun part is that the data is accurate enough and widely distributed enough that any attempt at anonymity is lost. Even without knowing your name is Nathan Whitman they can readily identify that device with a given MAC spends 10+ hours a day at Nathan Whitman's house, another 6+ hours a day at the place where Nathan Whitman works, and then enters Target at the same time that Target detects shopper #231414 who then goes to parts of the store that coincides with Nathan Whitman's consumer profile and then uses the self-serve kiosk where Nathan Whitman's credit card is used.
So what's the takeaway? The genie is out of the bottle and no amount of hand wringing is going to put it back. You just need to be aware of it and how this can be used to benefit you personally.
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