Peer Pressure

The passion for tracking, following, absorbing data, analyzing, aggregating, reacting, marketing and totally obliterating any semblance of privacy appears to be the newest and biggest trend among not just our beloved “pry-master” – the government – not only advertisers who suck down the key words in your emails so that they can market to you till the cows come home (which don’t anymore), but your big ole nasty boss. Not only do bosses have the right to drill into your office email account… or pretty much anything you do while tethered to your office computer, cell phone, laptop, tablet, etc., but they have tracking devices installed in their delivery trucks, GPS capacity on company cars and… wait for it… wait for it… a little ID tag that is a portable boss-spy that follows you just about everywhere.

For example, Hitachi’s Business Microscope system is like a toll-road EZ-Pass for the body… with infinite abilities to track everything you do! “The device looks like an employee ID badge that most companies issue. Workers are instructed to wear it in the office… Embedded inside each badge, according to Hitachi, are ‘infrared sensors, an accelerometer, a microphone sensor and a wireless communication device.’… Hitachi says that the badges record and transmit to management ‘who talks to whom, how often, where and how energetically.’

“It tracks everything… If you get up to walk around the office a lot, the badge sends information to management about how often you do it, and where you go… If you stop to talk with people throughout the day, the badge transmits who you're talking to (by reading your co-workers' badges), and for how long… Do you contribute at meetings, or just sit there? Either way, the badge tells your bosses… The stated intention of this is to increase productivity and get the most out of employees.” CNN.com, February 2^nd.

Don’t like the idea? Think it’s too intrusive for anyone to have the temerity to use it? Think about cameras in office space, supervisors listening in on calls to and from the company… and know that unions are almost gone from most of the American private sector, so if you don’t like it… “[T]here's not much, in the future, that employees will be able to do about it. With government surveillance, the public can complain that the state has no right to be scrutinizing the lives of its citizens so intrusively. But corporations can make the argument that supervisors have always been encouraged to keep an eye on how workers are spending their time when they're on the clock -- and that electronic tools such as the Business Microscope are simply a 21st-century way to do that. 

“The employers are paying for their workers' time, the argument will go -- and if the employees don't like being accountable for how they spend that time, they can always choose to work elsewhere.

“Hitachi says that by analyzing the ‘enormous amount of data collected with the Business Microscope, it will be possible to propose methods to improve organizational communication and quantitatively evaluate efficacy.’ Among the activities the badges record and transmit, according to Hitachi, are ‘the distance between people talking face-to face’ and ‘an individual's activity level (active or nonactive), which is determined on the basis of subtle movements detected (such as talking, nodding and silence).’

“And the sensor badges never sleep. They never take breaks. They don't go to lunch. As H. James Wilson, a senior researcher at Babson Executive Education, wrote in the Wall Street Journal, the badges not only transmit who employees are talking to and how long the conversations go on, but can ‘also measure how well they're talking to them.’ If you're in a conference room with colleagues and they are animated participants in a discussion about, say, sales strategy, while you just remain quiet in your seat, the badge knows it.” CNN.com.

I guess you can just quit if you think they’ve gone too far! And what better time to introduce such technology than a time in our economic history where jobs are tough to get, good paying jobs are dwindling and workers have learned to tolerate all kinds of new abuses. What do you think about the way the world is decimating every nook and cranny of your private and public life?

I’m Peter Dekom, and I bet there are going to be some really big surprises in too many end-of-year reviews in the coming years.