每天一篇经济学人 | Surveillance at work 工作中的监...

How a new age of surveillance is changing work

监控的新时代如何改变工作

Employee surveillance

监控员工

Look out: your boss may be watching you

注意：你的老板可能在监视你

Workplace surveillance is nothing new. The dark Satanic mills of 18th-century Britain had supervisors to crack the whip. Shops have long used CCTV to monitor customers and staff, and some factory and warehouse workers have had to face the humiliation of timed toilet breaks. Still, if you enjoy the comfort of a white-collar job, you may be stunned to learn just how much you are being watched.

监控工作场所并不是什么新鲜事。18世纪英国黑暗的撒旦工厂有挥舞着鞭子的监工。长期以来，商店一直使用闭路电视监控顾客和员工，一些工厂和仓库的工人不得不面对计时上厕所的羞辱。不过，如果你喜欢舒适的白领工作，你可能会对自己受到的“监视”之多感到惊讶。

Calls and emails are monitored using ever more advanced software. Artificial intelligence (ai) is taking the snooping to new levels, tracking everything from Zoom-call rictus and twitchy keyboard strokes to the consistent note of irritation in your voice, in an attempt to assess your productivity and judge your state of mind.

【1】twitchy 神经紧张的；焦虑不安的

【2】rictus 呲牙咧嘴

电话和电子邮件可以用更先进的软件监控。人工智能正在将窥探提升到一个新的水平，它会追踪你的所有信息，从Zoom-call时的呲牙咧嘴、敲击键盘时的焦躁，到你声音中持续的愤怒，它试图评估你的生产力和判断你的精神状态。

Surveillance is rising because work-from-home policies mean that employers are keen to keep tabs on their remote workforce. Before the pandemic, around one in ten of the large businesses asked by Gartner, a research firm, had spying software. Within three years it expects the share to reach 70%.

【1】keep a tab or tabs on sb/sth 监视某人/某物

监视正在变多，因为远程工作的政策意味着雇主们热衷于监视他们的远程员工。在疫情爆发前，咨询公司高德纳调查的大型企业中，约有十分之一的公司拥有监控软件。预计在三年内，这一比例将达到70%。

Bosses also have ever-expanding amounts of data at their disposal, enlarging the digital footprint that can be monitored. Widely used software such as Google Workspace, Microsoft Teams or Slack can tell managers what time you clock in or how many calls you join on their platforms. Employee badges fitted with motion sensors and microphones can alert bosses if someone is loafing about. The blurring boundaries between work and home mean that video surveillance and other intrusive tools are barging into workers’ personal lives, social-media accounts and private devices at all times of the day.【1】at sb's disposal 供某人使用 

【2】clock in 打卡上班

【3】loaf about 游手好闲

【4】barge into 闯入；打扰

老板们也有越来越多的数据可以处理，扩大了可以监控的数字“足迹”。 Google Workspace、Microsoft Teams或Slack等广泛使用的软件可以告诉管理者你什么时候打卡上班，或者你在他们的平台上打了多少通电话。员工的胸卡装有运动传感器和麦克风，它可以在有人偷懒时提醒老板。工作和家庭之间的界限越来越模糊，这意味着视频监控和其他侵入性工具无时无刻不在侵入员工的个人生活、社交媒体账户和私人设备。

The law is scrambling to adjust. In the state of New York employees subject to electronic monitoring must be told in advance, under a new law introduced on May 7th. Connecticut and Delaware require similar disclosures. California is considering new laws to strengthen privacy protections for workers, including a ban on digital monitoring without prior notice. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation establishes some basic rights for staff. Yet it is still early days and the technology is advancing fast. As a result, most firms are only just getting their heads around how much remote work is likely to remain permanent. A clear boundary between embracing new technologies on the one hand, and protecting workers on the other, has still to be drawn.

【1】get your mind/head around sth 弄懂（复杂或奇怪的事）

法律正在匆忙进行调整。根据5月7日出台的一项新法律，在纽约州，要想使用电子监控员工，需提前告知。康涅狄格州和特拉华州要求类似的披露。加州正在考虑制定新的法律来加强对员工隐私的保护，包括禁止在没有事先通知的情况下进行数字监控。欧盟的《通用数据保护条例》规定了员工的一些基本权利。然而，它仍处于早期阶段，技术正在快速发展。因此，大多数公司只是在弄清楚远程办公有多大可能是永久性的。一方面拥抱新技术，另一方面保护工人，两者之间的明确界限仍有待划定。

There are perfectly legitimate reasons for surveillance at work. Many jobs require monitoring for safety, security and compliance. Investment banks’ traders are tracked to prevent insider dealing, and the decisions of social-media moderators are traced and recorded to ensure consistency and accountability. In the same way that companies collect data on customers’ behaviour in order to improve their products, so professional employers are using monitoring tools to measure the productivity and engagement of their most important resource: their people. In the future such tools could help spot bad posture, root out bullying, and identify and share best practice among staff.【1】insider trading 内幕交易

【比较】safety 以及 security 释义：

safety：a state in which or a place where you are safe and not in danger or at risk safety指的是被保护起来的状态，远离那些有可能引起伤害的事物。safety还可以用来指代一种状态。

security：protection of a person, building, organization, or country against threats such as crime or attacks by foreign countries security泛指对个人、组织和财产的保护，使它们免遭外部威胁和一些犯罪活动的损害。需要注意的是，security更多聚焦在那些有意对个人、组织和财产施加伤害的行为。

在工作中进行监视是完全合理的。许多工作出于对安全性和合规性的考量会进行监控。监视投资银行的交易员，以防止内幕交易，跟踪并记录社交媒体审核员的决定，以确保一致性和问责制。就像企业为了改进产品而收集客户行为数据一样，专业的雇主也在使用监控工具来衡量他们最重要的人力资源（即员工）的生产率以及参与度。在未来，这些工具可以帮助发现不良态度，根除欺凌行为，并在员工中识别和分享最佳做法。

Yet it is easy to see the pitfalls. There is a long history of those with power abusing those without in the name of compliance and efficiency. In the most extreme cases, 20th-century despots ran vast informant networks, and some slave plantations in America and the West Indies kept tyrannical work records.

【1】informant 提供消息的人

然而，很容易看出其中的隐患。长久以来，有权力的人会以服从和效率的名义“虐待”那些没有权力的人。在最极端的情况下，20世纪的专制者拥有庞大的线人网络，美国和西印度群岛的一些奴隶种植园还保留着暴虐的工作记录。

Today’s workers are not indentured, obviously. But many studies link excessive individual surveillance to higher levels of stress. And if algorithms trained on biased data are used to make more decisions, the odds of discrimination will rise. One analysis found that ai systems consistently interpret black faces as being angrier than white ones.

显然，今天的员工是没有受契约束缚的。但许多研究将过度的个人监控与更高水平的压力联系起来。如果算法是基于有偏数据进行训练的，并用来做更多的决定，歧视的可能性就会增加。一项分析发现，人工智能系统一贯认为黑人脸比白人脸更愤怒。

What to do? As law and practice evolve, some principles should govern workplace surveillance. Individuals must be fully informed, as the New York law provides. Some firms now disclose monitoring methods in the fine print of their employee handbooks, and specify what data managers have access to. But that is no substitute for consistent, easily understood information for staff—so they can decide how to behave at work, and whom they choose to work for.

【1】fine print / small print 附加细则

要做什么吗？随着法律和实践的发展，工作场所监控应当遵循一些原则。根据纽约法律的规定，个人必须充分了解（监控）情况。一些公司现在在员工手册的细则中披露了监控方法，并明确规定数据管理人员可以访问哪些数据。但这并不能代替员工们一致、易于理解的信息——这样他们就可以决定在工作中如何表现，选择为谁工作。

Employers should have a legitimate reason for surveillance. Although the boundary will take time to establish through case law and precedent, this is vital to ensure that monitoring is proportionate. Firms should not have access to employees’ private devices, provided they are not used for work. And significant decisions made by algorithms should be subject to appeal and review by human beings. Establishing clear guidelines is not easy, but qualms over the potential abuse of surveillance will grow. It’s time to start drawing some lines. 

雇主应该有合法的理由进行监视。虽然通过判例法和先例来确定界限需要时间，但这对于确保“监控是适当的”至关重要。公司不应该访问员工的私人设备，前提是这些设备不是用于工作。由算法做出的重大决策应该受到人类的申诉和审查。制定明确的指导方针并不容易，但对可能滥用监控的疑虑将会增加。是时候划定一些界线了。