A Remote Employee Refused 160 Webcam Photos a Day. Her Employer Fired Her

This strikes me as an attempt to renege on employment agreements to allow WFH. I'd bet it's either to do soft layoffs, or get people back in the office to justify real estate.

She's got annual positive reviews 8 years running, and has been with the company for over a decade.

The question that really cuts to the chase is: Why does it require a photograph of the employee's face every 3 minutes in order to determine if they're completing their work? Why does that make any sense at all? What exactly is the employee doing that there are no metrics at all. There's nobody monitoring work loads or task completion? Nobody is checking for accuracy? There are no clients or customers or community members complaining about poor service? How were they able to determine positive reviews for almost a decade before? Why is your management so incompetent, and why is the price of that incompetence your employee's privacy?

Once I had an issue where I had to request access to a 3rd party vendor URL from my work machine. IT was telling me that I already had access, and that I had accessed the URL several times. Weird, because I was getting a dns resolve error. To prove that he wasn't making it up, the IT guy shared his screen with me.

Ever since I saw his screen and the level of details in my activity log on the work machine, I don't even access example.com on their device anymore.

I'm sure this workers already has invasive tracking software on her work machines. Now the company was just trying to fire her without it counting as a layoff.

That is an insanely bad look for that employer. This kind of invasive employee monitoring is treating people like property rather than as human beings. The problem is that the power dynamic between employers and employees in many countries is such that they can make the most outrageous demands and people will have to comply because there is always another person ready to step into their shoes.

There's been a lawsuit about this in Europe, couple years back. Employee won, breach of privacy according to Article 8 the European Convention of Human Rights. See https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-63203945

I wonder if the employer is in violation of ADA laws, and whether exemption from monitoring is “reasonable accommodations”.

Not that I think the broader practice for monitoring remote workers is something I think is a good idea.

I don't know the specifics of what her work involves, but why do companies still think what matters is how long their employees are sitting in front of a screen? I can't think of any jobs where that's directly correlated with productivity.[1] They could easily measure other metrics.

[1] Perhaps with the exception of adult webcam models, but that's an extreme edge-case where the lack of privacy is the job.

I wonder how many employer-provided laptops are secretly recording video or audio for WFH staff. You can tape over a webcam, but what do you do about a microphone you don't trust?

This should be illegal by law. Judge the performance by the outcome.

Yeah. and when I worked at capital one last year, the auto navigator division - my manager after not liking me tried to also fire me with a PIP and it started by asking me to come into the office in a specific work window.

after that, it changed to talking and speaking in a particular way in MRs and PRs (and "not" pushing back so much in them and being more agreeable). of course later the manager turned everything into "appease me" because whenever I would do my work and check off the boxes on the PIP he would say he couldn't see it because he didn't receive notice of it in the way he liked. Of course sharing in the pip review meetings weekly did not meet his needs to confirm "I did the things".

Employers will do anything to discriminate against you, legally or illegally, if it meets their leadership agendas. I especially have felt indian-pakistani hate and abuse during this process and was just so exhausted I never bothered to lawyer up.

This is gross. It says a lot about a company that they feel like they have to spy on people. Also, I’d be ashamed to work for a company that creates spyware like this in the e first place.

There’s a possibility that enough people ruin this for all the people doing it honestly. If it’s the case, there’s probably no fault of the employee.

It can be hard to remember, but companies are usually giving money in exchange for a time that they measure by outcomes and results and feeling that, they might wonder what’s going on.

Friendly reminder that Macbooks hardware disable the internal microphone if the lid is shut. https://support.apple.com/guide/security/hardware-microphone...

Just few hours ago I commented about how some companies pretend to have remote work while they technically are not, and personally, I remember a couple years ago one company was demanding (in the contract) to have a continuous non interrupted camera access for at least six hours a day, and that was before AI tools so I imagine this company is far worse and I feel sorry for whoever is working there now, I obviously rejected it and they got even more offended how dare I reject it! Crazy stuff

Lazy people and slackers ruined WFH. That's EXACTLY why companies wanna see such photos.

This is not different from seeing you at the office from a CCTV camera. If you are an honest worker - you should not worry.

my 2c

Bring it on, as a programmer im savvy enough to fight it by blocking their IP addresses.