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Do you hog office conversations? Or not talk enough? Does your voice squeal Do you sit very still at your desk all day? Or do you fidget under stress? Where do you go in the office? How much time do you spend there? To whom do you talk?
An employee badge can now measure all this and more, all with the goal of giving employers better information to evaluate performance. Think of it as biometrics meets the boss.
A Boston company has taken technology developed at MIT and turned it into special badges that hang around your neck on a lanyard. Each has two microphones doing real-time voice analysis, and each comes with sensors that follow where you are in the office, with motion detectors to record how much you move. The beacons tracking your movements are omitted from bathroom locations, to give you some privacy.
[...] Those concerned about their privacy might be alarmed by the arrival of such badges. But Humanyze says it doesn't record the content of what people say, just how they say it. And the boss doesn't get to look at individuals' personal data. It is also up to the employee to decide whether they want to participate.
"Those are things we hammer home," Waber said. "If you don't give people choice, if you don't aggregate instead of showing individual data, any benefit would be dwarfed by the negative reaction people will have of you coming in with this very sophisticated sensor."
[...] Waber said the company is careful not to divulge personal data to the employer, preferring instead to stick with broad analytics. Employees get to see their own data, but managers do not get to identify the employee with the specific data.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 3, Insightful) by WillR on Monday September 12 2016, @04:28PM
horseshit! humans are very clever and through a series of known events, associate data points with individuals. to believe someone won't is just fantasy.
And even if they can't do it, they'll try anyway!
Are you getting called in to explain yourself to HR frequently? Maybe the boss thinks badge number #4596 is that fucking weasel WillR he's been trying to fire for the last 6 months, and keeps flagging every hint of an infraction he can find in your recording.