With fitness trackers in the workplace, bosses can monitor your every step - and possibly more

[dalton99a]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/with-fitness-trackers-in-the-workplace-bosses-can-monitor-your-every-step--and-possibly-more/2019/02/15/75ee0848-2a45-11e9-b011-d8500644dc98_story.html

With fitness trackers in the workplace, bosses can monitor your every step — and possibly more
By Christopher Rowland
February 16 at 7:13 PM

IRVING, Texas — On his 21st day back at work after a heart attack and triple bypass surgery, Chris Zubko received a call from the main office. Through an app on his phone, his boss was literally monitoring every step of Zubko’s recovery.

“Man! I noticed your steps have picked up,’’ gushed Wayne Gono, 65, whose family operates Regal Plastics, a small fabrication business with satellite shops around Texas. “You used to be under 2,000, now you’re over 6,000. Two times you worked out this week. Good!’’

Welcome to a rapidly growing phenomenon in the workplace: constant health surveillance.

A digital fitness tracker strapped to Zubko’s wrist sends a tally of his daily movements, via the company’s UnitedHealth Group insurance account, to an app on his boss’s phone. While some employees might find this real-time feedback intrusive, Zubko, 51, said he is unfazed.

[Stargazer09]

1. Yikes!!!!

No. No. No. Not a good idea.

No employer needs that information. Too many ways this could be abused.

[BBG]

2. You misunderstand.

It doesn’t matter whether they need the information or not. As an employer they want it and might think they need it. Employees should be prepared to accept conditions dictated by the employers and grateful to be employees. The workplace does suck at times.

[LakeArenal]

11. Exactly why unions are important.

[Beartracks]

3. So did the company provide the tracker?

[magicarpet]

4. Put the tracker on your dog's leg...

... let your boss monitor that.

[flor-de-jasmim]

5. Darn! You deserved at least one valentine heart for that!

[magicarpet]

6. Tanks....

[magicarpet]

7. Oh,.... they vanished,.. credit me one for VD 2020.

[Locrian]

8. get ready - it's comming....

people mistake what AI is going to be - thinking it will just displace jobs, etc

What the next boom is going to be is in MONITORING people. Like this, but with AI. And there will be a whole industry that springs up around it, with people looking to be the next AI-dot-com type company.

AI in marketing, AI in monitoring, AI in finance, AI in stock market etc. ALL of this working to extract every last $$ from us and turn us into slaves.

Am I pessimistic? yes.....

[Oneironaut]

9. It's already here, imo.

Our lives are currently tracked in amazingly disturbing ways. The legislature is decades behind catching up to current technology.

We are all products. We generate money for people in ways we don’t even realize. I would say half, if not more of harvested data is used unethically / nefariously.

Nothing you do on the internet is private. The stuff that’s set to “private” is even less private. Everything a person does on the internet - their political posts and ideas, their text messages to their mother, the songs they like, their shopping habits, their interests, the weird porn they watch - hundreds of companies know.

Big Brother is an algorithm. He already knows almost everything about everyone.

PS - If you have an iPhone, or worse, Alexa / Google Home / etc., they’re very likely listening too. You’re being spied on 24/7.

[Locrian]

10. agree - I just think it's going to get worse - n/t

[appalachiablue]

12. An issue that really annoyed public school teachers

last year in WV. In order to use their healthcare, they were told they had to start sending daily data about their waist measurement and other fitness info. to their health co. by phone. With other issues it pushed them to walk out I read.

The insane quest for 'data' is endless.

- Francis Galton, British statistician and eugenics movement pioneer. Galton devoted much of the rest of his life to exploring variation in human populations and its implications, at which Darwin had only hinted. In doing so, he established a research program which embraced multiple aspects of human variation, from mental characteristics to height; from facial images to fingerprint patterns. This required inventing novel measures of traits, devising large-scale collection of data using those measures, and in the end, the discovery of new statistical techniques for describing and understanding the data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton