Privacy has been a prickly topic at Harvard ever since it was revealed last year that the university had searched the email accounts of some junior faculty members, prompting a major self-examination and promises by the administration to do better.
But this week, that sore spot was poked again. The university acknowledged that as part of a study on attendance at lectures, it had used hidden cameras to photograph classes without telling the professors or the students.
While students and faculty members said that the secret photography was not as serious as looking through people’s email, it struck many of them as out of bounds — or, at least, a little creepy. And it set off more argument about the limits of privacy expectations.
“I wouldn’t call it spying,” as some people have, said Jerry R. Green, a professor of economics and former university provost. “But I don’t think it’s a good thing.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/07/us/secret-cameras-rekindle-privacy-debate-at-harvard.html
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 09 2014, @12:10AM
Which most large corporations acknowledge doing routinely, for various purposes ranging from monitoring employees to prevent illegal activity/sexual harassment/moonlighting/job hopping/transfer of internal documents, to performing "Big Data" studies on interactions between employees in different groups within the company.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday November 09 2014, @12:11AM
I'm trying to see if I have my star yet.
But more ontopic, it's a good thing that academics are in a position to squash this kind of shit rather than bend over and accept it like, say, pretty much every employee working for publicly-traded or private corporations.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by edIII on Sunday November 09 2014, @02:03AM
Except that a corporation has an incredibly better ethical foundation to do so. Let's not pretend they are the same.
The true challenge that corporations have right now is purely one of when it's appropriate to use a technology, and what can and should not be done with computing resources.
Corporate surveillance (at least what I support) isn't about removing privacy from employees at all . It's simply the attempt by the corporation to be involved and able to monitor employee activity that is rightly paid for and affects business data. Affecting business data is an extremely bad thing. It leads towards situations in which millions of credit cards are released or private medical info is now in the wild.
A corporation should have the ability to monitor every keystroke, every mouse movement, every single piece of business data being accessed and the nature of that access.
What you may object to is that an employee is restricted in their ability to deal with the world privately, from the safety and comfort being provided for them at work while they are being compensated (boy is *that* another discussion) to service the customer (note I did not say shareholder).
Employees are not entitled to that. Not from any ethical position. Screw them. Work. While I know we are abused as workers, two wrongs don't make a right. Especially, when our attempt to take back some equality also measurably harms us with data leakage. I wouldn't even connect my own cell phone to my own network, as there really is no reason to do so, and it only opens up attack vectors.
It's an old and stupid argument as well if I may be honest here. When I was running a corporation I just put an access point down on its own separate VLAN with access to outside networks and secured it with guest services. Guess how much I gave a shit what the employees did with it? Zero. It was a perk of employment and I greatly encouraged (forced actually) any personal activities to be done with BYOD. If you wanted BYOD access to corporate resources, I just laughed, and laughed, and laughed. Then I laughed a little bit more and went to lunch to go laugh in a different location. I don't care. Fuck you. End of BYOD Utopian debate.
What happened at Harvard isn't in the same ballpark, not in the same league, it ain't even the same fucking game.
Harvard students are not employees of anyone (certainly not Harvard at least) and the kind of environments in which we learn are not to be subject to surreptitious recording for any reasons. There is not just a reasonable expectation of privacy in these instances that is being violated. Harvard had no basis on which to do this. They weren't entitled by any kind of social contract to protect intellectual property in the classroom, and they can't argue that it's in the best interests of Harvard as a corporation protecting business interests monitoring employees either.
The best Harvard could possibly argue for is that they were attempting to provide security, and not collecting scientific data in highly unethical ways that most scientists would disagree with. Where were the placards disclosing close circuited surveillance and informed consent to participate in a scientific study?
I don't believe this is remotely the same situation. Not at all.
Harvard's fuck up here isn't comparable at all, and is intensely worse IMO.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hellcat on Sunday November 09 2014, @04:40AM
First off, corporations don't have to have "ethics" - assuming we can agree on a definition of what ethics means. The behavior of corporations is dictated by law. Many things employees do during work hours can be considered private, and the law protects those actions. Going to the bathroom is one. Lunch can be considered another. Your relationship with your employer is covered by a contract; the fact that there are modern gray areas to what can be considered private is still being slugged out in court.
Second, the greater aspect here is that we are heading towards a society in which all behavior can be recorded; whether it's measured or used will be part of "big data." Do those of us that remember greater freedom continue to resist, or should we accept the seemingly inevitable and embrace a totally "open" society in which everyone knows everything about everyone?
Be careful what you say - we're all watching!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday November 09 2014, @07:18PM
The behavior of corporations is dictated by law.
But it's not solely based on the law. The law rarely has much to say about intimate employee relationships unless it veers into sexual harassment and discrimination. But businesses often have a lot to say about hanky panky on company time and often that is based on ethics rather than how the boss felt that day or what employees the boss happens to like or dislike.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Sunday November 09 2014, @10:06PM
No, corporations absolutely must have ethics. Ethics are not a mysteriously vague term either, but let's put in layman's terms:
Stop doing evil fucking shit
I dunno how to say it otherwise. I didn't expect to get into an existential argument about the definition of ethical conduct between adults governing most of our relationships. Only thing complicated we ever need to argue about with respect to ethics are moral issues derived from religion and non empirical sources.
Do we need to talk about such things, or can we just agree to a nice base level of common sense ethics like no pokey-pokey with sharp sticks, no stealing, no lying, etc.?
corporations are not people
You don't have enough drugs to make me believe that, and no amount of 1984 type crap will get me to tow this line. Therefore, corporations must have ethics, as corporations are made up of citizens, and citizens must have ethics. Citizens without ethics tend to play the hide-the-salami game in concrete places with restrictive steel appliances.
Otherwise, to me, it seems as if a proposal is being made whereby we deliver these magical ski masks to select men and women:
Government: "HEY! We caught you lying and dozens of people have died and you did it all to make some profit!! It's the gas chamber for you, you bastard..."
Corporate: "Uhhh.... ski mask?"
Government: "Oh. Yes. Ski Mask. Sorry, sir. How can we help?"
Corporate: "Well, all those FDA regs are a bit of a pain in the ass, and who can really believe some scientists talking about problems and dead patients right? Happens everyday. Correlation causation. It was just a *little* death"
Government: "Of course. The struggle is real. Ski masks have it hard, but you do so much for us in return. Again, how can we help?"
Corporate: "Well... you could not enforce the law and actually stick it to us. That's a first. Don't treat us (there are other ski masks) like regular people. Can we not go to jail, divide up the company, and perhaps pay a small penalty?"
Government: "Absolutely. Can you stick around for a quick customer service survey?"
Dear... sweet.... baby.. jesus.
There are NO "modern" gray areas and that's a load of bullshit. If I can speak as one of the "corporate watchers" for a moment and quote myself, from my heart:
Back to your last bit...
Resist. Always.
However, you present a false dichotomy. Harvard was wrong, but that doesn't have anything to with corporate surveillance.
Accept that when you enter the door to our company, that you are acting as a larger group. If we have the technical ability to literally be in the room with you with a customer, we will . It ends arguments and enhances customer service quality when a simple recording tells me that for some reason you did call this customer a twatwaffle. Likewise, it also tells me that the customer was lying and nothing was ever mentioned about a price or service. In short, it removes a lot of legal liabilities with respect to regulatory agencies and actually helps the employee.
Interestingly enough, that's not the problem. The challenge is not that we are in the room, it's that we are who we are. Cops are employees. Our employees. We want to literally watch every step that they make right? So it's not wrong in every use case.
What employees are afraid of is judgment. If you have less events being monitored, than judgment can only occur against those monitored events, and the gestalt view is considered instead.
For instance, I might take off at 10am. Run an errand. Make a phone call. Take lunch. Vendor meeting. Afternoon quickie in a parking lot. Come back, work hard for about 3 and half hours on some code. Make progress. Meet deadlines. Cause revenue.
The "cool" boss only sees vendor meeting, hard work, and caused revenue. Everything else was more of less extraneous. I got it done today.
The automated corporate surveillance though saw I was off property for 4 hours, parking lot camera was picked up by security showing the quickie, and the version control system and terminals showed I only did 3.5 hours of logged in work. Worse, the security service receives cross referenced updates from Big Data, and my errand was actually a donation to the EFF followed by a pro-abortion visit with an unknown female to a family planning facility. I also kicked a dog. Dunno why.
Perhaps it's not that corporations need to change at all. We need to change and stop being judgmental dicks to each other as well as paying attention to the results. What we object to is someone forming judgments over stuff that wasn't their business in the first place. From experience, that's managers finding any excuse they can to pay you less. How does surveillance change that? In 1955 that asshole would have just found some other excuse to deny you the raise or just be a miserable cunt in general.
I don't see it as that complicated. Act as an employee, your performance is measured and monitored so we can become better and keep things safe and secure. You didn't perform any action requiring privacy that was also monitored. Hats on, hats off, hats on, hats off.
Make the law reflect this relationship and its nature, and then prevent everything else.
(Score: 2) by halcyon1234 on Sunday November 09 2014, @01:29AM
Original Submission [thedailywtf.com]
(Score: 1) by Wrong Turn Ahead on Sunday November 09 2014, @02:20AM
They do it and the punishment is self-examination and a promise to try to be better. You do the same and your punishment is multiple felony charges, massive fines and maximum years behind bars...