alt Hacker NewsDo you believe that police should have their activities monitored at work? How about child care workers? Nuclear power plant operators? Bank tellers?
And if those are ok, what makes them different?
Replies
rsynnott • today at 6:50 AM
Certain activities, for certain highly restricted purposes, yes. Blanket data collection for a purpose unrelated to safeguarding, which can be trivially leaked, as above, no.
It should be an unpleasant necessity, highly regulated. Not just something that you do on a blanket basis because you suffer under the delusion that you might create the next magic robot (I assume the driving force here is that Facebook is very, very behind in LLM-land.)
They’re different because of the job they do, who’s doing the monitoring and who has access to the records.
In all the examples you’ve given the monitoring is used to reduce the power imbalance between the public and vested interests with their own agenda.
For example, so the bank teller doesn’t steal from account holders.
For child care workers it’s to protect children in care. If it was used solely to gather information to fire potential whistleblowers people would have a problem with it too.
Considering that, for example, Meta management have a record of encouraging their staff to break copyright laws and lie about it, this surveillance probably isn’t designed to help society as a whole.