Peter Walker – The Guardian March 26, 2021
For anyone concerned that an era of home working could also become one of remote surveillance, the training video for Teleperformance’s in-house webcam security system, called TP Observer, is the stuff of bad dreams.
Explained by “Anna”, a desk-sitting avatar complete with an artificial voice, the video introduces TP Observer as “a risk-mitigation tool that monitors and tracks real time employee behaviour, and detects any violations to pre-set business rules”.
Anna explains that this means home workers will have an AI-enabled webcam added to their computers that recognises their face, tags their location and scans for “breaches” of rules at random points during a shift.
These include an “unknown person” detected at the desk via the facial recognition software, “missing from desk”, “detecting an idle user” and “unauthorised mobile phone usage”.
Anna says: “Any breach detected by the AI triggers a real-time alert to the supervisor for further actions.” This means a still photo is snapped and sent to a manager.
The video includes a series of avatar-staff asking questions, including one who asks whether the system is “a breach of my privacy at home”. The manager tells him the scanning is needed to “help us with risk mitigation and data security, which is required by most of our customers”.
Another digital employee asks if they will get into trouble if children or other family members approach their home workplace. Not “as long as the people in the background are not directly looking into the screen, or very close to it”. Anna replies. Staff should sit with a wall behind them “to avoid such breaches”, she says. Strong lights should be used for night shifts, so the camera can see properly.
Teleperformance said the system would not be used for UK staff, but it is expected to be used in a number of 30-plus other countries where the French-based multinational operates and where labour laws are less strict.
They’ve been doing this in some places with schoolkids at home but away from their computer desk and calling it truant, issuing excessive fines to the parents for their kids’ absence. (Excessive fines used to classed as cruel and unusual punishment because they impact the poorest, but as the west becomes more authoritarian it’s the first stick they beat us with.) But it takes surveillance and its control right into your home and you are no longer the king of your own castle.
It’s time those who control what goes on inside our home pay the mortgage for it.
Most sheeple are/were monitored at their work stations at their place of work. So the sheeple accepted that, so what’s wrong with doing it in your home?
Well said, MM- get them to pay the mortgage.
The fact that the Guardian doesn’t like it tells us that it’s a good thing.
How many times recently have you been screwed by some jerk who is supposed to be ‘working from home’, but who is actually dossing around, doing as they please on someone else’s dime? It’s no different to an office supervisor.