I find it fascinating how okay you are with your employer tracking you. We aren’t to the life contract part of the dystopia yet, quit trying to skip ahead and give away your freedom so easily
If you are in a secure area, like a server room for example, it's perfectly normal for there to be badged entry, cameras everywhere etc. There will also be signs everywhere telling you this.
If it's really secure there will be monitoring of all entrances, including corridors. (And there will still occasionally be people successfully tailgating, usually for perfectly innocent reasons like forgetting their badges at their desks etc. Real security is all sorts of fun.)
In fire/hazard conditions, security systems are required (at least in Australia) to permit free handle egress from any point in the building to a fire escape.
Any access control system has the capability to integrate with a fire system and allow this.
I believe the general policy in the States is "one swift motion" to exit a room which is why you see mostly crashbars and lever handles as egress, mostly on push doors for the primary egress path.
In secured areas where they want you to swipe out or places where they might get tripped accidentally, they sometimes have like a 15 second lockout before actually tripping the door.
I've been in just one server room and they just had a motion-deactivated maglock tied to an electric strike so in the case of a power outage a simple mechanical lock could be opened but otherwise you need to badge in/out.
Some facilities get exceptions to fire policy and require employees to go through training of sorts. Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant is one place I visited that did not have emergency egress. No badge? Call the guards, that is the only way out.
Fire hazard and false imprisonment. Ask walmart. You accidentally lock someone in the store and you are looking at a civil rights law suit. You cannot restrict another humans' movement without due process.
Never been to a Walmart specifically, but every store around here broadcasts a "closing the store in X minutes, please be outside of building by then" message on the loudspeakers a bunch of times, then the employees pack some things up and walk through the entire shop to check if everything is ok and the security personnel, being the last to leave, check all cameras before finally locking up.
This seems like plenty of due diligence for the store not to be liable is someone gets locked inside.
Obviously not the same type of facility, but I have seen buildings where the closing of smoke shutters opens otherwise locked doors, revealing an alternate fire escape from the corridor to the stairwell.
I'm okay with my employer tracking me if I'm on their premises using their property that they've given me. I'm not okay with them knowing anything I do or where I am outside of work, but if I'm at work then I'd be confused if I wasn't being tracked in some way.
Not at all in the paranoid "are you slacking off?!" sense, but just security information like knowing when I've been in a server room, or knowing if my work computer sent traffic to a known botnet C&C. If there's a security or theft incident and they don't know who's been in their building or what their computers are doing, it's pretty much impossible to investigate anything.
I understand that in places like Europe there's a very different culture and workers have a lot of protections from things employers may want to do, but not everyone around the world feels that way. Basic record-keeping of when badge-restricted doors and computers are authenticated to doesn't feel invasive to me in the slightest, even if others may strongly feel it is invasive.
There are many things I would find egregiously invasive, such as a manager inspecting all the websites someone visits to assess how productive they are, or timing people's bathroom breaks, but I just avoid such companies.
I don’t understand why people think the employer cannot check whether the employee is slacking off.
Maybe what we should prevent is employer keeping months of proof and only bringing it up as inappropriate later, but if the employer uses the camera to tell an employee within 24hrs that he needs to ramp up, it feels ok. Maybe we should impose rules like “24hrs max” and “can’t be used legally, just orally.”
> I don’t understand why people think the employer cannot check whether the employee is slacking off.
On some level it depends on what 'slacking off' means.
I've had employers where 'slacking off' meant actively doing some %mundane/repetitive/unnecessary% task with every moment of my free time. We were literally pulling the finish off the counters; there was no need to keep dusting them.
I've had software shops where reading integration documentation was 'slacking off'.
An interesting data point; In Germany, MS Office doesn't track how long you have been editing a document. My understanding is this is because the law there more or less says if you pay someone to do a task, you aren't supposed to (i.e. can't) care about how long it took them to actually do it as long as it was done on time.
So I guess that's my problem. There's a very fine line between employers using surveillance to catch 'bad actors' and employers using surveillance as another tool to bully substandard work conditions onto people.
My guess is that micromanagement actually decreases quality and productivity as well, just due to the disconnect between management opinions and real-world employee experience. If you are judging performance on the output correctly, the employee will, out of own self-interest, maximize the quality and quantity of the output while minimizing their own effort expended in creating it.
100% of the information an employer needs to determine my productivity can be found by looking at my work output. They don't need to know what I'm doing or looking at at every given moment. The results speak for themselves.
I'm sure they have a legal right to check (in the US), but I really wouldn't want to work for such a company and would immediately start looking for a new job if it happened to me.
The day one says I'm "slacking off because we noticed inactivity on your laptop" is when I stand up and walk out the door. Hasn't happened yet but I suspect it will at some point.
Cloudflare sells security to people. If you don’t want to work at a company that has security requirements like that, don’t work there. Lots of people choose to donate their fingerprints, facial data, life history, and polygraphs to work for the government. That’s their choice to make.
If that info is well taken care of is one think. If it ends up floating on the internet is another. Rfid badge data floating on the net creates is useless however other personal data could be very toxic in the wrong hands. And usually this info leaks thats why its not a great idea to let it outside the network let alone record it in the first place
How is being recorded by your employer while on their premises giving away your freedom? It would be a different thing if they were tracking you out of work, but when you enter a premises owned by a business you kind of implicitly agree to be surveilled by them, as it is their right and freedom to protect their assets.
We were tracked by contract (badge into building, badge into area). We couldn’t leave the work area un-attended which was a pain, so there were “processes in place” (last person badge etc..).
Generally we knew they left you alone unless you were cheating. (Having someone badge you in when you weren’t there was a fire able offense).
I don’t miss it, but it wasn’t that bad. Of course having the work network not on the internet what else could we do but work...
Its only natural really in this race to the bottom. If your zero hour contract doesn't have room to pay the bills you are not just not worried about tracking, you'd take anything that might show how hard you've tried.
