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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: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 12 2016, @09:25AM
The beacons tracking your movements are omitted from bathroom locations, to give you some privacy.
Apparently not the microphones...
Why would a company risk this? It sends their employee's voice data and movements to a cloud service. Both are massive security risks. Live tracking of everyone in the build provides the ability to find gaps in security coverage. Voice data leaks trade secrets.
Now I read the article. The proposed reasons are to see who communicates with whom so they can relocate the offices together. That could be analyzed through emails or simply asking people. They also talk about how top traders have a different emotional profile from other people. Who do we get to congratulate for being the first person to be fired for not quickly performing breathing exercises right after a stressful event? Lets fire everyone with high blood pressure and anyone with detectable sounds of irritable bowel syndrome too. It'll save on company insurance costs.
There's no way they can do some of the things they describe without keeping the audio streams. I expect they'll sell it to voice recognition companies too as those guys can always use more voice samples. I give it a year before they have an agreement with TV and radio stations to determine which employees are hearing which ads. That tech is already in use on cell phones. Constant voice analysis is a gold mine for targeted ads.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Monday September 12 2016, @10:46AM
Having a nervous breakdown? For one week only we have 50℅ reductions on lithium, Prozac and haloperidol. Get yours now while stocks last. Always read the label. Drink responsibly.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Insightful) by WillR on Monday September 12 2016, @04:09PM
(Score: 2) by Bogsnoticus on Tuesday September 13 2016, @04:09AM
But I always take my movements in bathroom locations.
To do otherwise would risk public indecency charges.
Genius by birth. Evil by choice.