Comcast Launches New 24/7 Workplace Surveillance Service (philly.com) 152
America's largest ISP just rolled out a new service that allows small and medium-sized business owners "to oversee their organization" with continuous video surveillance footage that's stored in the cloud -- allowing them to "improve efficiency." An anonymous reader quotes the Philadelphia Inquirer:
Inventory is disappearing. Workplace productivity is off. He said/she said office politics are driving people crazy. Who you gonna call...? Comcast Business hopes it will be the one, with the "SmartOffice" surveillance offering formally launched this week in Philadelphia and across "70 percent of our national [internet] service footprint," said Christian Nascimento, executive director of premise services for the Comcast division. Putting a "Smart Cities" (rather than "Big Brother is watching you") spin on "the growing trend for...connected devices across the private and public sectors," the SmartOffice solution "can provide video surveillance to organizations that want to monitor their locations more closely," Nascimento said...
The surveillance cameras are equipped with zoom lenses, night-vision, motion detection, and wide-angle lenses, while an app allows remote access to the footage from smartphones and tablets (though the footage can also be downloaded, or stored online for up to a month). Last year Comcast was heavily involved in an effort to provide Detroit's police department with real-time video feeds from over 120 local businesses, which the mayor said wouldn't have been successful "Without the complete video technology system Comcast provides."
The surveillance cameras are equipped with zoom lenses, night-vision, motion detection, and wide-angle lenses, while an app allows remote access to the footage from smartphones and tablets (though the footage can also be downloaded, or stored online for up to a month). Last year Comcast was heavily involved in an effort to provide Detroit's police department with real-time video feeds from over 120 local businesses, which the mayor said wouldn't have been successful "Without the complete video technology system Comcast provides."
Re:We need communism now! (Score:4, Insightful)
The workers must rule.
Right, that worked very well in Eastern Europe.
We need stronger privacy laws, nothing else. Keep your communism in the USSR please.
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Democracy, the workers are the majority, the workers must rule. A government of the workers, by the workers and for the workers. I might not agree with everything real democracy produces but I do accept it because I do truly value the worth of Democracy. The workers must rule they are the majority, suck it up! My religion, Freedom, Democracy and Justice, more than just an empty belief or motto. Nobody expects the global democratic reformation https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] that's what it will feel like f
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You must be a member of one of the older generations.
We do work. We work our asses off, and in many cases in more than one job or while trying to get an education. We don't get paid much because that would cut into the companies profits, but how much we get paid is not a a good measurement of labor put in. It hasn't been for years, not since company execs decided that paying a living wage to the
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Great! You have a couple thousand jobs that you didn't tell anyone about, please tell the people! If you think that everyone who wants a job can get one, I'm pretty sure you can point us to them!
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I found a thing better than starving.
BANG
You're dead now and don't need your wallet anymore. Hey, if the alternative is starving to death, I take my chance killing you and only MAYBE get killed for that.
Re:We need communism now! (Score:4, Informative)
Right, that worked very well in Eastern Europe.
Invalid analogy, the worked NEVER actually ruled in any Communist / Socialist Eastern Block country.
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Re:We need communism now! (Score:5, Insightful)
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The communist model didn't work for the same reason this one is failing: People want money. Not a job. The job is the necessary evil for money.
The communist model failed because people noticed that they could get money without working.
This one is failing because people are noticing that even if they were working they cannot get enough money.
Re: We need communism now! (Score:2)
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The idea was to oversimplify the problem to get the 5 second attention span millennials to actually listen for a change...
The problem of the communist model wasn't wellfare. It was basically what you said: No matter how hard you worked, it didn't matter. So people didn't. They took the GDR party slogan "We have to squeeze everything from our factories" to the heart and did exactly that. The consideration for the average worker was no longer how to produce more but how to get more out of it for himself. Sinc
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Yes, but oddly there's a lot of people who want to give me everything and their soul for those oddly colored rectangular pieces of paper. And as long as they do, it has a value.
Money is a commodity like any other. Its value is not what you attribute to it but what someone else is willing to give you for it.
Hire me! I love hard work! (Score:3)
Hire me! Hire me!
I love hard work!
I could watch it all day!
But seriously folks, I mostly enjoyed my work and didn't even want to retire when the big three-letter-company was done with me. Looking at the developing situation, now I think I got out just in time.
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Right, that worked very well in Eastern Europe.
How would you know, considering that they have actually never ruled there yet?
That's kinda ironic (Score:3)
Yeah, I'm baiting you. But I'm doing it because I'm annoyed that you're instantly equating something you don't like (being monitored by a private company you work for) with something else you don't like (government telling you to do things you don't want to do).
It's something I see a _lot_ here in America. Folks are all for Government doing the things they want but if
Re: That's kinda ironic (Score:2)
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You'd think the last 100 years of this dogmatic nonsense would've taught everyone a lesson by now. Communist states typically provided the worst environments with the least incentives for workers.
Sounds good! (Score:1)
As long as I'm one of the elite classes that tells the others what to do.
German approach (Score:5, Informative)
Personally I like the German approach better. No logging. None. We have swipe cards to enter the building for security reasons, when it was found that the timestamps of those cards were logged there was a huge stink about it even though as best anyone could tell no one actually ever accessed the logs. Employers are simply not allowed to monitor employees.
Now that can go too far as well since that inhibits our ability to improve processes and makes incident investigation very difficult, but it's a shitload better than what is being proposed here.
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Indeed, this would be illegal in the EU in general due to the European Charter on Human Rights and EU data protection laws.
It's interesting how the EU and the US treat freedom differently. The US has extreme negative* freedom, that is the government doesn't interfere to either restrict or protect. The EU has more of a mixture of positive and negative freedom, where some interference is accepted as necessary to protect human rights and allow people to live some kind of meaningful life. Both options have meri
Re: German approach (Score:2)
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It depends a little on the company - but the (existing) logs from the door systems have to be very well protected. But these systems typically will mainly log if you exceed your working time on some day, and you total hours.
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germans ARE allowed to monitor.
csb time: I used to work at cisco in the US and a friend who worked at cisco in .de told me that they disclose to their german employees the kinds of wiretapping they do (mgmt) to their employees. mgmt can turn on the webcam and mic at any time, do screen captures, enable keylogging, lots of things. all cisco laptops from corp IT come baked-in with corp spyware. not to worry, ALL big corps do this, now, and they bake-in fake certs so that you authenticate with the corp fire
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germans ARE allowed to monitor.
Germans are allowed providing all employees agree to it.
In the USA companies can do whatever the hell they want.
There's a difference.
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>When you are in a company building, you should expect to be watched.
No. It's illegal.
>I don't understand what the problem is.
It's illegal. Also unethical.
Re: German approach (Score:2)
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Your employer hires thieves? What morons. Maybe they should spend the money to hire good people.
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Everywhere I've worked in the chicago area the cleaning people are small business contract workers, they bring their own gloves. They don't steal because it's a family/friend business, they don't dare ruin things for the family.
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So, when someone steals something, you just shrug your shoulders and move on cause there's no accountability at all?
Funny you should mention that, we've caught thieves plenty of times doing bag inspections on the way out. My girfriend caught thieves by just remembering who was working with her the day the till didn't add up when counted after hours.
There are plenty of ways to catch people doing the wrong thing that doesn't involve strapping a camera in their face and recording their every single move.
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When you are in a company building, you should expect to be watched.
^^^ Ladies and gentlemen the sad reality of modern America. People exist who actually think like this.
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minimum wage jobs (Score:2)
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also have maximum security...or at least the max affordable
Not exactly. The command and control mentality with corporate America is quite common. I used to work for a Fortune 100 company. Hell, I'll tell you the name. World Fuel Services. More accurately, I worked for a company that was bought by them. I eventually left of my own accord because the place had grown so toxic because of corporate, but that's another story.
After being acquired, eventually the corporate facilities guy got around to us, and
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Just walk into any healthcare facility in the US. Panopticon ain't in it. We've got cameras monitoring cameras and locks protecting locked drawers.
In college I worked for a large aviation company as a summer intern in a high security facility. It was more relaxed than the little hospital I work in presently. I just wish they would let us review the feeds so I could figure out where I left my glasses.
Re:Take whoever came up with this (Score:5, Funny)
This is completely unacceptable, unethical, immoral, and it cannot be allowed to spread.
What more would you expect from Comcast?
Re:Take whoever came up with this (Score:5, Funny)
You don't need a drug addict.
You just need a guy with a red stapler.
--
BMO
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Bad customer support?
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Already the most hated company in America, is comcast trying to create some kind of hatred singularity?
Re: Take whoever came up with this (Score:2)
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I can see why American businesses would want to monitor their employees for insurance purposes, not only to try and prevent slaking off. With all the ambulance chasers, sexual harassment lawsuit, firing related lawsuits, etc., makes sense. If the laws are such that the employer can be taken to court just to try and get money out of an employer, this service can provide some level of protection by presenting some type of evidence that may quickly prove many allegations to be lies.
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Not content to just fuck you at home, now they fuck you in your workplace as well!
I just got a letter explaining that to service me better, they are increasing the fee they charge to re-broadcast the channels I can get for free over the air.
Re:Take whoever came up with this (Score:4, Insightful)
1) Start a retail business.
2) Get robbed by someone who walks in the front door. Or,
3) Have one of your employees attack another one. Or,
4) Have one of your employees get hooked on heroin and start to steal your inventory.
I'm guessing your solution to getting to the bottom of such things is to hire people to stand around watching everything so they can testify based on their recollections of events later, in a trial. Because you sure wouldn't want what happens on your own property with your own inventory with your the people you pay money to be there doing things to be recorded. Until you really, really do because real life is different when you start paying a fortune in insurance as part of running a business. Or find yourself in court. Or are running out of money because of inventory shrinkage, or have to know which of your very good employees is totally innocent of what one of your rotten employees has been setting them up to look guilty for.
But yeah, I can see why you'd advocate violence against a vendor offering a service you can choose to ignore if it's not useful to you.
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Give them a decent paycheck so they actually have something to lose if they get fired?
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Those same people will tell you they didn't steal anything because they were "perqs" of the job. But let their underlings take a half pencil home and they
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So, not the person who originally posted, but someone coming from 20+ years in the US workforce across a half dozen industries.
If someone making six figures steals a $20 widget every week, you're losing $1000/year, or about 1% of your personnel cost. If it costs you more than $1000/year to fix that, it's a bad idea to fix, as long as it's not getting worse.
You'd have to buy or build a way to catch them, build the process to reprimand and then fire them, hire additional HR personnel to run the whole thing,
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Replying to my own thread on this one; if you find an employee stealing the *same* $20 item every week? Hell, turn it into a free perk.
Employees who think their employers give a damn do at least twice the work in the same amount of time. If you're going to spend the money (and you probably should anyways), get them to work harder for it.
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The problem is, there is zero probability that this new corporate surveillance will be aimed at IT directors.
Because if there's one thing we've learned, it's that if you are rich and you steal, it's considered, "smart". If you're making $35k/yr and you make an unauthorized copy of your tax return on a company xerox machine, you're going to get frog-marched out of the place.
Late-stage capitalism is a cancer.
Re: Take whoever came up with this (Score:2)
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Yes, well, why are steps 2, 3, and 4 even a thing? We don't have a society, we don't have a culture of honesty and dignity, and no amount of techno-crap will ever make up for that. And if you think that this 'product' is a 'solution' to some sort of 'problem', well, your head is somewhere awkward.
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Why would you run a business without an insurance?
Who suggested that? But why would pay far more for your insurance than you need to? You can hugely mitigate those costs by having a decent security system. Which you know, but are pretending you don't.
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I have. And you know why?
Because there were no cameras in the manager's office, just 3 of them aimed at the cashier and two on the beer fridge.
Brand new manager walked in and turned us from an A store to a C- on profit losses even though our sales had actually gone up.
Two months later when corporate got involved, there were 3 high-rez color cameras aimed at the cash and the beer-fridge circuit was untouched. We cashiers could not be trusted with the deposits we never stole, because after we'd make the tripl
New policy (Score:4, Insightful)
In addition to the new "Big Brother know best" observation system, the beatings will continue until morale improves.
Who cares about morale (Score:2)
does the equipment have outlet / renting fees? (Score:3)
does the equipment have outlet / renting fees? Knowing Comcast they may just do that + lock you into a 2-3 year deal as well.
high definition is now only 720p at comcast! (Score:3)
high definition is now only 720p at comcast! I can buy my own 1080P ones for under $100 each.
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Are they trying to win some kind of evil award of something?
Google got a lot of milage from "Don't Be Evil".
Maybe Comcast is trying for a shorter, edgier theme in view of more apocalyptic flavor of recent events : Be Evil.
As someone that works in a workplace too cheap... (Score:1)
to pay for lights, the nightvision sounds attractive to my employer. It sucks working Seattle Hundreds (16 hours a day Mon-Thur and 12 hours a day Fri-Sun) in a dim office.
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Seattle is a mere 46 deg N
London is 51 deg N
Edinburgh is 55.9 deg N (400 miles N of London)
We don't have the 'Seattle disease' here. If anything, the offices are far too brightly lit.
Don't complain about the high lattitude of US cities unless they are in Alaska.
And you will need to rent Comcast internet hardwar (Score:4, Insightful)
And you will need to rent Comcast internet hardware to make use of this. Yes if you want comcast business internet static ip you must rent there gateway on top of the static ip fee.
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file an fcc complaint.
But with trump that may not do any thing.
Team Tables (Score:1)
At my company everyone (including former remote employees) just sit at team tables. We take all breaks (including bathroom breaks) together, and always go to lunch together. I really doubt we need such a service.
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No, you need counseling.
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What the fuck? Sounds like you work in a prison... ... as inmates
Or a special ed class... as students.
Funny (Score:3)
I work with a bunch of right wingers that flip out over stuff like this, but if the government contacted us about doing contract camera installs in people's bedrooms, they would be sitting around working on quotes and figuring up profit margins and commissions. I guess we all have our price.
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but if the government contacted us about doing contract camera installs in people's bedrooms
Paranoia much?
Hackers will have fun with that. (Score:4, Insightful)
Is this service network neutral? (Score:3)
So this is what they're spending their money on (Score:1)
Too bad it isn't to upgrade the infrastructure for the cash cow of residential customers. It's to build out a system for a solution in search of a problem.
The more you know.
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I got asked if I wanted to transfer my service to a friend or family member... I'm not that evil and it hurts to think about how assholes might exist that would do this to somebody...
So...giving up on passwords somehow? (Score:3)
I mean, if you've got full surveillance of the workplace, then a camera can be looking at you keyboard as you type the password.
So what do you do instead of passwords? Biometrics? Some kind of plug-in token? Does Comcast get the business for your conversion of that too?
Or are the employees supposed to hunch over and shield the keyboard with their bodies when typing in passwords?
Who's taking bets on how long before some company is seriously compromised by this?
Who shall watch those selfsame watchers? (Score:3)
So now we have a level of people who spend all their time watching other people working (or faking it), but the obvious new job opportunity is to get a job watching the guys who are watching the other guys.
It's the ultimate in job security, because they'll always need to hire someone at the next level up!
Unbounded recursion? Resources exhausted? Whatever do you mean?
POS (Score:2)
Outstanding!!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
We can use this facility for police bodycams, right? You know, the ones that seem to consistently "lose" footage at convenient (critical) times?
The real purpose (Score:1)
So it's not about businesses using intrusive technology to enforce time and asset management. It's about police increasing surveillance and push-button policing while businesses socialize their time and asset management expenses.
Does Comcast really want to be hated *more*? (Score:4)
This just reeks of micromanagement.
Too late Comcast (Score:2)
Productivity is at an all-time high. This is one reason why people can't find jobs: work that used to take several people is now being done by one, and that one suffers in silence just glad to have a job. And they can see the line of applicants at the door.
So what crack is Comcast smoking? Maybe their cameras can tell them where to get it.
Here's the thing: any business desperately threatened without cameras A) already knows it, and B) almost certainly already has cameras in place. Cameras have been chea
Poor brand management (Score:2)
First customer! (Score:2)
FINALLY! (Score:2)
my last company did this.. (Score:2)
cameras with microphones in the ceiling that covered the whole workspace, as managers we were allowed into the office for 45 mins in morning and at end of day for paperwork and email correspondence, otherwise the office was supposed to be empty with everyone doing field work. South Carolina is one of those wonderful "work at will" states, so I willed myself to work elsewhere....
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not as bad as it sounds (Score:1)
I see a lot of people putting the "big brother" spin on this and talking about watching employees. I certainly agree that watching your employees' every move accomplishes nothing.
On the other hand, if you run a business like a gas station, convenience store, fast food restaurant, etc then watching the public areas and the outside of business with cameras is a good idea. As for who monitors the footage, that's simple: there's no need to monitor it 24/7. Just review it when you need to (ie if something hap
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I see a lot of people putting the "big brother" spin on this and talking about watching employees. I certainly agree that watching your employees' every move accomplishes nothing.
Yes it does. It accomplishes acceptance of the surveillance state everywhere.
All together, it makes customers feel safer at their business, and discourages troublemakers.
I don't want to be safe, I want to be free. What are customers doing in restricted areas or offices where employees are.
they have admitted that while some businesses experience small drop in customers initially,
Ridiculous, as if the police give a fuck about a businesses customers enough to know what happened *before* the cameras were installed.
Imagine two scenarios:
Both scenarios refer to publicly accessible spaces and have nothing to do with cameras monitoring the workplace.
Next Headline (Score:1)
Comcast CEO found to be doing NSFW activities in office by Workplace Surveillance
Comcast Cancelled Workplace Surveillance services
Phase II (Score:2)