Cable Giant Spectrum Endangered Its Employees And Screwed Its Technicians During COVID

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

Most broadband providers saw a major uptick in both subscribers and revenue during the COVID crisis, as working and schooling at home exploded. But at the regional monopolies that dominate the U.S. telecom sector, revenue most assuredly didn't go to employees at most of these major companies. In fact, Gizmodo has a new report highlighting how cable giant Charter (whose broadband and TV services are sold under the Spectrum brand) doubled its revenues last year thanks to COVID, yet found a way to dramatically reduce pay for its field technicians:

"Like countless other corporations, Charter amassed new pandemic-era wealth— $3.2 billion, nearly double the previous year. Charter did so, in part, by widely expanding its “self-install” program, which it touted as a major “cost-saving” measure. But contract workers say the “savings” came straight out of their pockets through a systematic scheme to mislabel their jobs as lower-paying emergency fixes."

Charter was widely criticized for putting both the public and its own employees at risk in the early months of the pandemic. Workers whose jobs could be done remotely were blocked completely from being able to work at home -- despite repeated instances of positive COVID tests at the office (a stark contrast from Comcast). Meanwhile subcontractors complained consistently they weren't being given the PPE necessary to enter consumer homes safely. The company has also come under fire for exploiting an FCC COVID broadband discount program to drive customers to more expensive tiers.

At the same time, pay dropped significantly thanks to a procedural classification trick. During COVID, Charter's new self-install option reduced the need for an on sight technician visit, allowing the customer to connect and install the cable modem themselves. Inevitably cable technicians have to visit these homes anyway, either because the user screwed something up, or because there were inherent problems in the local building or block wiring that the customer couldn't fix. But Charter used this opportunity to classify these visits as somehow less important than traditional installs, reducing subcontractor pay significantly:

"Under William’s contract company, a TV, phone, and wireless hookup for Spectrum would normally pay a contractor about $64. But the same job reclassified as a self-install pays around $35 through his contract company. He and fellow contractors sent their managers emails with photos showing that they’d done four or five hour jobs for only $35, but it didn’t change a thing. William said that he’s lost 60% of his pay since Spectrum took over his local market five years ago."

For many years cable and broadband companies have distanced themselves from a lot of dodgy dysfunction by outsourcing work to third-party contractors. These companies are often dodgy as hell, and the employees are treated even worse than traditional contract employees, Gizmodo notes:

"Rob claimed that he lost his house and can’t afford to date because he can’t pay for dinner. He has to cover all of his own work expenses, which include surprises like a $2,000 meter that his company, which has a contract with Spectrum, forced him to buy, only driving him deeper into debt. That’s on top of the $300 per month for required liability insurance and the $8,000 to $10,000 in annual fuel costs. This summer, he couldn’t go to the hospital when he suffered heat stroke, a potentially fatal illness that can lead to organ failure. He worries that he’s one accident away from breaking down. “I feel brittle,” he said."

Most regional broadband monopolies don't see enough real competition for the "free market" (which U.S. telecom decidedly isn't) to apply any real pressure to do better. Charter union employees have been boxed out and are currently engaged in the longest strike in US history because they wanted better pay and health care. And because for the last 30 years the U.S. has generally operated under the idea that mindlessly deregulating U.S. telecom somehow produces near Utopian outcomes (it's abundantly clear this isn't true), regulators have largely become defanged and feckless. Then there's Congress, which is so slathered with telecom campaign contributions as to be largely useless.

As a result, nothing meaningfully changes, and it's not that hard to exploit a pandemic to grab more revenue without ever seeing regulatory or policy accountability.

Filed Under: covid, employees
Companies: charter

Court Refuses To Block Trump Exec Order On TikTok As Requested By TikTok Employee After DOJ Says He Can Still Get Paid

from the so-many-arguments dept

There have been a variety of lawsuits filed regarding Trump's silly Executive Order regarding TikTok, but one interesting one involves an employee of TikTok, Patrick Ryan, who filed suit on his own behalf to try to block the Executive Order from going into effect. A key part of Ryan's argument is that since the executive order bans transactions, it would mean his own salary from TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, might be blocked by the US government.

It is impossible to know now whether the Commerce Department will exempt the payment of wages and salaries from the dictates of the Executive Order, and Plaintiff will not know until the day the order is to take effect, but any plain reading of the language of the order would include the payment of wages and salaries to U.S. employees of TikTok within that definition

As such, Ryan asked the court to issue a Temporary Restraining Order to block the Executive Order from actually going into effect on September 20th. There's more to the lawsuit than that, but the DOJ responded to say "we won't block employee salaries."

The Department of Commerce can state that it does not intend to implement or enforce Executive Order 13942 in a manner which would prohibit the payment of wages and/or salaries to Plaintiff or any other employee or contractor of TikTok.

The Department of Commerce can state that it does not intend to implement or enforce Executive Order 13942 in a manner which would prohibit the provision of benefits packages to Plaintiff or any other employee of TikTok.

The Department of Commerce can state that it does not intend to implement or enforce Executive Order 13942 in a manner which would result in the imputation of civil or criminal liability to Plaintiff or any other employee or contractor of TikTok for performing otherwise lawful actions that are part of their regular job duties and responsibilities.

That caused Ryan's lawyers to declare at least an initial victory:

This morning, the Government advised Plaintiff’s counsel and later the Court that it in fact will not apply the Executive Order to the payment of TikTok wages, salaries or benefits, or impose civil or criminal sanctions against them for doing their jobs, thereby mooting the need to seek a temporary restraining order against the Government to protect the TikTok employees.

We are pleased that our litigation was able to achieve this fantastic result for the thousands of TikTok employees around the world, and we are confident that the remaining issues in this case also will be litigated fully to a successful conclusion, which will be the striking of the Executive Order as a unconstitutional overreach by this U.S. President.

However, it also made it easy for the judge to then deny the requested TRO:

Ryan’s application for a temporary restraining order is denied for two related reasons. First, there is a serious question about whether this Court has jurisdiction to issue a temporary restraining order at this point in time. It seems unlikely that the conflict between Ryan and the federal government has ripened into a true “case or controversy” within the meaning of Article III of the United States Constitution. Babbitt v. United Farm Workers National Union, 442 U.S. 289, 297 (1979). Whether Ryan could actually face prosecution for getting a paycheck from TikTok depends on a number of uncertain conditions. As a foundational matter, the President may only exercise his emergency powers to block transactions with a foreign-owned entity. ByteDance is widely reported to be in negotiations to alter its ownership structure in a manner that could result in non-enforcement of the Executive Order.

Even if that fails, the Secretary of Commerce would need to include payments to employees on the list of prohibited transactions. And then there would need to be real risk that federal government would actually start prosecuting TikTok employees for receiving paychecks. That is an unlikely chain of events—indeed, yesterday the government filed a notice in this case specifying that the Department of Commerce “does not intend to implement or enforce [the Executive Order] in a manner which would prohibit the payment of wages and/or salaries to Plaintiff or any other employee or contractor of TikTok.” It is thus doubtful—at least at this time—that Ryan’s alleged fear that he faces prosecution is reasonable.

The second reason for denying the temporary restraining order is that, even if the Court presently has jurisdiction, Ryan has not demonstrated that he is likely to suffer irreparable harm absent an immediate ruling. His vague allegation that he would suffer reputational harm from the government’s implementation of the Executive Order against TikTok certainly does not suffice. Ulrich v. City and County of San Francisco, 308 F.3d 968, 982 (9th Cir. 2002) (citing Paul v. Davis, 424 U.S. 693, 701, 711 (1976)). And to the extent Ryan seeks to protect a future paycheck (or to protect against prosecution for receiving money that TikTok owes him for work performed), that protection could be readily provided at a later date, if and when the possibility of losing it becomes more concrete.

Of course, many of these cases may be moot, should the Treasury Department decide that the weird non-sale to Oracle solves any "problems" for TikTok.

Of course, there's still another lawsuit from a bunch of WeChat users about the Executive Order, and since there's no attempt to sell WeChat... that case may have a longer lifespan, but we'll cover that in another post (stay tuned).

Filed Under: donald trump, employees, executive order, patrick ryan
Companies: bytedance, tiktok

Facebook Employee Revolt Shows, Yet Again, That There Are Other Incentives Beyond Section 230

from the incentives-come-in-many-forms dept

One of the most frustrating claims that critics of Section 230 make is that because of Section 230 the big internet companies have no incentive to deal with awful content (abuse, harassment, bigotry, lies, etc.). Yet, over and over again we see why that's not at all true. First of all, there's strong incentive to deal with crap content on your platform because if you don't your users will go elsewhere. So the userbase itself is incentive. Then, as we've discussed, there are incentives from advertisers who don't want their ads showing up next to such junk and can pressure companies to change.

Finally, there are the employees of these companies. While so much of the narrative around internet companies focuses (somewhat ridiculously) on the larger-than-life profiles of their founders/CEOs, the reality is that there are thousands of employees at these companies, many of whom don't want to be doing evil shit or enabling evil shit. And they have influence. Over the past few years, there have been multiple examples of employees revolting and pushing back against company decisions on things like government contracts and surveillance.

And, now they're pushing back on the wider impact of these companies. That's a Buzzfeed article detailing how a bunch of employees inside Facebook are getting fed up with the company's well-documented problems, its failure to change, and its failure to take into account its broader impact.

“This time, our response feels different,” wrote Facebook engineer Dan Abramov in a June 26 post on Workplace, the company’s internal communications platform. “I’ve taken some [paid time off] to refocus, but I can’t shake the feeling that the company leadership has betrayed the trust my colleagues and I have placed in them.”

Messages like those from Wang and Abramov illustrate how Facebook’s handling of the president’s often divisive posts has caused a sea change in its ranks and led to a crisis of confidence in leadership, according to interviews with current and former employees and dozens of documents obtained by BuzzFeed News. The documents — which include company discussion threads, employee survey results, and recordings of Zuckerberg — reveal that the company was slow to take down ads with white nationalist and Nazi content reported by its own employees. They demonstrate how the company’s public declarations about supporting racial justice causes are at odds with policies forbidding Facebookers from using company resources to support political matters. They show Zuckerberg being publicly accused of misleading his employees. Above all, they portray a fracturing company culture.

The examples in the Buzzfeed article may not be representative of how all employees feel, nor is it necessarily indicative that Facebook will definitely change its policies one way or the other. It's just highlighting that pressure to be better, to be responsible, and to build better products comes from all over -- and in Silicon Valley many employees came up with the belief (cynical or not) that they're here to change the world for the better. And when they realize they may not be doing that, many will speak out and push back.

And that is likely to have an impact over time: especially when the big tech companies are fighting over top talent, and desperately trying to hire the best engineers possible. If those engineers speak up and speak out, it can create very strong incentives for companies to change and to improve -- all without needing to take an axe to Section 230, which has little to nothing to do with all of this.

Filed Under: employee revolt, employees, morale, section 230
Companies: facebook

Tim Bray, Early Internet Guru, And Amazon VP Quits Over The 'Chickenshit' Company's Targeting Of Employees Speaking Out About COVID-19

from the good-for-him dept

If you do anything internet related, hopefully you already know Tim Bray. Among tons of other things, he helped develop XML and a variety of other standards/technologies the internet relies on. He's also been a vocal and thoughtful commenter on a wide variety of issues, especially in the tech policy space. For the past five years he's been working at Amazon as a VP and Distinguished Engineer -- but as he's announced he has now quit in protest over the company's retaliation against workers who were speaking up over the company's handling of their working conditions during the pandemic. Bray gives some of the background of workers organizing and speaking up about their concerns, and then discusses the company's reaction (firing the vocal ones and offering lame excuses).

Warehouse workers reached out to AECJ for support. They responded by internally promoting a petition and organizing a video call for Thursday April 16 featuring warehouse workers from around the world, with guest activist Naomi Klein. An announcement sent to internal mailing lists on Friday April 10th was apparently the flashpoint. Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, two visible AECJ leaders, were fired on the spot that day. The justifications were laughable; it was clear to any reasonable observer that they were turfed for whistleblowing.

Management could have objected to the event, or demanded that outsiders be excluded, or that leadership be represented, or any number of other things; there was plenty of time. Instead, they just fired the activists.

At that point I snapped. VPs shouldn’t go publicly rogue, so I escalated through the proper channels and by the book. I’m not at liberty to disclose those discussions, but I made many of the arguments appearing in this essay. I think I made them to the appropriate people.

That done, remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised. So I resigned.

Bray does not mince words about how terrible he thinks this response was, and even includes "some descriptive phrases you might use to describe the activist-firing."

1. “Chickenshit.”

2. “Kill the messenger.”

3. “Never heard of the Streisand effect.”

4. “Designed to create a climate of fear.”

5. “Like painting a sign on your forehead saying ‘Either guilty, or has something to hide.’”

Tim notes that while he does believe that the company has been "putting massive efforts into warehouse safety" the workers' own testimony can't be ignored either -- and that firing workers for speaking out and trying to make things better is exactly the wrong response.

Firing whistleblowers isn’t just a side-effect of macroeconomic forces, nor is it intrinsic to the function of free markets. It’s evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture. I choose neither to serve nor drink that poison.

For reasons beyond just the coinage of the phrase, I find it especially interesting that Bray made the Streisand Effect comparison. Amazon has a history of somewhat ruthless employee practices, but straight up intimidation of a workforce speaking out for their health and safety in the midst of a pandemic, when they're more essential than ever... seems just insanely short-sighted and self-destructive. Hopefully, Bray taking a stand and quitting his job makes someone wake up within the company that this is the exact wrong approach.

While Amazon may be right that its warehouse workers have the short end of the power-balance stick, the company is still deep in competition for engineering talent. Bray quitting so publicly and with such clarity of purpose may certainly make a number of top engineers whom the company would like to hire think that they may feel better about their souls by choosing to work elsewhere.

On a separate note, Bray points out that the Guardian, somewhat bizarrely for a major publication like this, simply reprinted his entire blog post without first asking him:

Tim does have a CC BY-NC 2.0 license on his blog, where the post was originally made, but it's not clear whether the Guardian's use would really be considered "non-commercial." Of course, for years we've called out the vagueness associated with what is and what is not "non-commercial" use, but the Guardian is at least on a very thin borderline. I find it somewhat surprising that it chose not to at least ask before publishing it. At the same time, the Guardian has tremendous reach, and if the most important part to Tim is getting his message out, the Guardian is not a bad way to do it.

Update: Tim took out his list of descriptive phrases after someone suggested it was too far. We'll be leaving them in this post. Separately, he notes that the Guardian took down their post and apologized, and he seems content with this outcome.

Filed Under: covid-19, employees, organizing, streisand effect, tim bray, warehouse
Companies: amazon

NY AG Opens Inquiry After Charter Spectrum Bungles Its Coronavirus Response

from the monopolizing-stupidity dept

By and large, most major ISPs have handled the labor angle of COVID-19 relatively well, with giants like Comcast and AT&T offered hazard pay, and Verizon slowing new broadband, phone, and TV installations altogether.

Charter, which sells broadband, TV, and phone service under the Spectrum brand, has been a different story entirely. The nation's second biggest cable company is now facing an inquiry by New York's Attorney General after several weeks of bad press highlighting how the company wasn't giving its employees hazard pay or adequate protective gear (many got $25 gift cards to closed restaurants instead), wouldn't let many employees work from home even if it was easy, and even forced people to continue to work in buildings where co-workers tested positive for the virus.

With some 250 Charter employees now sick, New York's Attorney General has opened an inquiry into the company's bungled response:

"The company’s stance on working remotely became the subject of internal debate on March 13, when Nick Wheeler, an engineer in Denver, sent an email to hundreds of colleagues and a senior vice president with the subject line “Coronavirus — Why are we still in the office?”

“Coming into the office now is pointlessly reckless,” wrote Mr. Wheeler, who provided a copy of the email to The New York Times. “Charter, like the rest of us, should do what is necessary to help reduce the spread of coronavirus."

While Charter has since buckled on some of its more stubborn policies, it required weeks of employees leaking to any news outlet that would listen about the company's failure to adequately protect them. Employees are still pissed, and still say the company isn't doing enough to protect its workers (and by proxy many of the communities and customers they serve):

"But even in cases where multiple employees have confirmed testing positive for the virus, which has killed more than 175,000 people worldwide, Spectrum’s call centers and storefronts have kept their doors open, serving as potential hotspots for exposure. While Charter has allowed some workers, in certain circumstances, to temporarily work from home, its pandemic response has largely focused sanitizing its workspaces after hours. Employees fear that this is doing too little to shield them from the disease or prevent them from giving it to customers, whose equipment they handle and whose homes they enter daily."

None of this should be surprising given that Charter literally has one of the lowest customer satisfaction ratings of any company in industry in America (think about that accomplishment for a moment). Big ISPs don't handle disasters very well, as evident by the way cable giants routinely hassle wildfire victims over their cable boxes after having just lost everything. They're not flexible, creative, or adaptive companies, because as government-pampered monopolies in regions with no competition or oversight, there's absolutely no incentive to be.

Speaking of no oversight, the FCC hasn't issued so much as a peep about the company's Keystone-cops-esque approach to handling the pandemic. Nor has the agency had a single word to say about the fact that Charter has been kicking struggling customers offline during the crisis, despite very clearly promising not to as part of a highly theatrical, temporary, and entirely voluntary PR stunt heavily hyped by the agency to give the illusion it was actually helping.

Filed Under: covid-19, employees, hazard pay, new york
Companies: charter

Another Coronavirus Side Effect: In-Home Surveillance By Remote Workers' Employers

from the spyware-but-for-people's-faces dept

Well, it took a pandemic to normalize domestic surveillance by [checks notes] employers. Not sure if this is the dystopia we needed or the one we deserved, but the shelter-in-place policies that have turned lots of office workers into telecommuters has led to incredible growth in one particular market sector.

With so many people working remotely because of the coronavirus, surveillance software is flying off the virtual shelves.

“Companies have been scrambling,” said Brad Miller, CEO of surveillance-software maker InterGuard. “They’re trying to allow their employees to work from home but trying to maintain a level of security and productivity.”

Axos spokesman Gregory Frost said in a statement that “the enhanced monitoring of at-home employees we implemented will ensure that those members of our workforce who work from home will continue” to meet quality and productivity standards that are expected from all workers.

This new surveillance obviously doesn't extend to the executive levels of these companies. It's the rank-and-file that will feel it the most -- the same that have been subjected to always-on monitoring of their computer and internet use while at the office.

It's another system -- one that can be gamed just as easily as those deployed in the workplace. Actually, these will probably be gamed even more easily considering some companies are using weird metrics like "emails sent" to gauge worker productivity.

But there's more to it than virtual bean-counting and hall-monitoring. The spyware that works-from-home will also alert clients if employees engage in certain behavior.

Managers using InterGuard’s software can be notified if an employee does a combination of worrisome behaviors, such as printing both a confidential client list and a resume, an indication that someone is quitting and taking their book of business with them.

Companies that don't want to pay extra for snooping software are relying on existing systems to make sure their employees are earning their paychecks. But these methods are even more intrusive than software specifically crafted to track telecommuter productivity.

“I’ve heard from multiple people whose employers have asked them to stay logged into a video call all day while they work,” said Alison Green, founder of the workplace-advice website Ask a Manager.

Slightly less intrusive than this low-tech "solution" is a new product that acts like a low-power CCTV camera installed by proxy in every telecommuting employees' home.

In order to keep productivity high while working remotely, some companies are turning to tools like Sneek. The software features a "wall of faces" for each office, which stays on throughout the workday and features constantly-updating photos of workers taken through their laptop camera every one to five minutes.

Welcome to micromanagement hell:

If a coworker clicks on their face, Sneek's default settings will instantly connect the two workers in a live video call, even if the recipient hasn't clicked "accept." However, people can also configure their settings to only accept calls manually — and only take webcam photos manually — if their employer allows it.

Chances are, none of these employees were subjected to supervisory visits to their desks every few minutes while at work. There's no reason for them to be subjected to it now just because they're working from home. The only reason this is happening is because it can happen. It's seamless, automated, and makes zero physical or mental demands from their employers.

If you can't trust your employees to work remotely, you probably can't trust them at the office either. And if there was any mutual respect between the employer and its employees, efforts like this will erode that very quickly. Employees who feel their employers don't trust them aren't too motivated to add value to the company they work for. Always-on surveillance isn't going to result in productivity. It will result in pointless busywork and a shit-ton of resentment.

Sneek's CEO Del Currie issued one of stupidest defense of pervasive surveillance of employees while defending his product from critics.

The purpose of Sneek isn't surveillance, Currie said, but office culture.

Currie claims a wall-of-faces that's continuously connected to each other (as well as their mutual supervisors) will keep people from feeling "isolated" while working from home. Currie may sincerely believe his remote work tool is better for employees' wellbeing, but it's doubtful most of the companies signing up for Sneek accounts to deal with newly-minted teleworkers are concerned about anything more than ensuring no one's getting paid to do nothing -- even if they've paid for plenty of hours of zero productivity back when everyone was under one roof.

Things aren't going to go back to normal once the coronavirus is under control. Employers may find they can still get work done without needing everyone in the same building breathing the same air. Some will find they can get the same amount done with fewer employees. The only constant will be the ability to invade their employees' homes to "ensure productivity" or "build office culture" or whatever. That will be here to stay.

Filed Under: bad boss, covid-19, employees, employers, surveillance, work at home

Italian Spyware Company Execs Arrested After Company Employees Spied On Innocent Citizens

from the power-and-responsibility-once-again-decoupled dept

Any tool that gives people access to tons of personal data will be abused. Law enforcement databases are routinely misused by government employees. Ring -- law enforcement's favorite consumer home product -- collects tons of data about its customers and this data has been inappropriately accessed by Ring employees.

The perfect storm of illicit surveillance and snooping comes from companies that sell spy tools to law enforcement but retain control of the servers where the personal data and communications are stored. An Italian developer, Diego Fasano, followed up his successful medical records app with something far more troubling: law enforcement spyware deployed with the aid of service providers.

The concept behind the company’s product was simple: With the help of Italy’s telecom companies, suspects would be duped into downloading a harmless-seeming app, ostensibly to fix network errors on their phone. The app would also allow Fasano’s company, eSurv, to give law enforcement access to a device’s microphone, camera, stored files and encrypted messages.

Fasano christened the spyware “Exodus.”

The software was popular. Prosecutors all over Italy bought Fasano's product. So did Italy's NSA, L'Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Esterna. There's no telling how much the government slurped from targets' phones over the years, but one prosecutor discovered the truth about eSurv's operations on accident. The information harvested by investigators wasn't walled off from the internet, only accessible by the prosecutor's office. It was accessible to anyone with the right credentials, stored thousands of miles away.

The Naples prosecutor began a more in-depth probe—and found that eSurv had been storing a vast amount of sensitive data, unencrypted, on an Amazon Web Services server in Oregon.

The data included thousands of photos, recordings of conversations, private messages and emails, videos, and other files gathered from hacked phones and computers. In total, there were about 80 terabytes of data on the server—the equivalent of roughly 40,000 hours of HD video.

This meant eSurv employees -- at least the "Black Team" running eSurv's "Exodus" project -- could also access these recordings. There's no evidence (yet) that they did or that this very valuable stash of law enforcement intel was ever exfiltrated by hackers. But the fact remains law enforcement agencies did not have control of their harvested surveillance.

This would have been a tempting stash of personal info for eSurv employees to dip into. But they didn't. They didn't have to because they were already deploying their malware to intercept communications and exfiltrate data from Italian citizens who had been tricked into installing eSurv's malicious, telco-miming apps.

In one instance, the Black Team hacked the phone of a 49-year-old woman from Crotone, a port city on the coast of Calabria, according to the prosecutor’s filings. The team collected the woman’s personal text messages to family and friends, and covertly recorded more than 3,800 audio clips using her mobile phone’s built-in microphone, chronicling the woman’s life and interactions as she went about her daily business, the filings say.

In all, the Black Team spied on more than 230 people who weren’t authorized surveillance targets, according to police documents. Some of the surveillance victims were listed in eSurv’s internal files as “The Volunteers,” suggesting they were unwitting guinea pigs.

A court has already stated the company's product was "designed and intended.. to operate with functions that are very distant from the canons of legality." That should be an indictment of the law enforcement agencies who purchased it as well, but somehow it isn't. The proper paperwork may have been filed and approved by judges, but the spyware relies on cell service providers deceiving customers so malware can be implanted through fake apps.

If the company has abused it tools, it's safe to say some of eSurv's customers have as well. For now, it's only eSurv's principals being investigated. But it does highlight the danger this malware poses, even when it's supposedly only being used for good.

Filed Under: diego fasano, employees, exodus, italy, spyware, surveillance
Companies: esurv

Shocking Absolutely No One, Ring Admits Employees Improperly Accessed Customers' Data

from the who-could-have-seen-this-coming dept

Ring never fails to disappoint. And by "disappoint," I mean never fails to be disappointing. This pleases me. So, I guess Ring never fails to please… by being incessantly disappointing.

I realize this is beginning to resemble a beating that continues long past the point the victim has lapsed into unconsciousness. But if Ring hadn't made itself such an inviting punching bag, I would not continue to rain down printed blows on its oh so very soft body.

Ring first grabbed our attention by offering up a snitch app that encouraged neighbors to start talking about suspicious people in their neighborhood. This app also happened to be a portal for the voluntary sharing of footage captured by Ring cameras, most of which were built into Ring's "smart" doorbells.

From there, things went from bad to worse to godawful to horrendous to PR-team-on-constant-suicide-watch. It has been super-enjoyable for me (and hopefully for Techdirt readers) for two reasons:

1. Ring promiscuously got in bed with over 600 law enforcement agencies, selling them "free" cameras to hand out to homeowners with some implicit/not-so-implicit strings attached. In return, law enforcement agencies gave up their authority and autonomy, granting Ring permission to write their press releases and statements for them.

2. Ring does not care about its customers. It enjoys a commanding lead in the market, but it has produced yet another internet-connected thing that it does not bother to secure properly. When breaches happen -- and they are unimaginably horrifying breaches that involve hijacked cameras -- the company says customers should have done more to secure their devices, rather than accept any responsibility for doing as little as possible to prevent this sort of thing from happening.

So, the latest news is more fuel for the dumpster fire. It's not just cops grabbing footage without bothering with the Fourth Amendment niceties. There's also abuse happening internally -- the sort of abuse you'd expect when you give people access to a wealth of personal information.

The doorbell-camera giant Ring has terminated employees in recent years for improperly accessing users’ video data, parent company Amazon told lawmakers this week, an admission that could increase pressure on the firm to prove it protects customer privacy.

The company has investigated four complaints regarding employees abusing their access to camera data over the past four years, Brian Huseman, a vice president of public policy at Amazon, wrote in a letter to five senators this week.

The company did not provide any detail about the data that was improperly accessed, but considering how much data Ring collects -- along with footage from millions of cameras -- the imagination is free to run wild.

This is the latest unsurprising development for Ring. Give enough people access to intimate recordings and data, and abuse is bound to happen. Maybe the Ring employees were just following the lead of their law enforcement partners, who also have access to a great deal of personal info and abuse this access with alarming frequency.

I'm sure Ring will weather this news cycle as it has every other over the past 12 months: by claiming it takes everyone's security seriously and sending out tweets to anyone tagging the company with the latest bad news saying the coverage is inaccurate. But no one believes Ring, especially when its defensive tweets talk their way around direct questions and link to talking points delivered by Ring reps.

Ring is no longer just a dumpster fire d/b/a a security camera company. Its flaming dumpster existence is mounted to every flatbed car on a never ending train wreck. It can't pull the plug on its thousands of buddy cops. And it appears to be far more interested in market growth than properly serving the customers it already has. Things will get worse. That's it. There's no "before it gets better." At best, Ring can only hope to fade from the public eye before it alienates any more of its past and future customers.

Filed Under: abuse, doorbells, employees, police, surveillance, video
Companies: amazon, ring