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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: 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.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.