If body cams get cheaper and cheaper, companies might start asking more people to wear them while working.
E.g.: https://coloradosun.com/2024/07/31/youth-corrections-audio-surveillance/
I could see this for doctors, at restaurants, stores,, etc… eventually.
Are you ready to wear one?
EDIT TO ADD: A few people said this wouldn’t ever make sense for doctors (privacy laws) or for fixed locations (stores). I should have thought of that.
But what about Uber / bus drivers, or repair people who go into homes? I can imagine a large corporation thinking a cam is a good idea, for their own CYA (not for the customers’ or the employees’).
Also I don’t like this idea either, to be clear. I was mostly playing devil’s advocate here to see what you all think. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Pretty much what I expected, tbh
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Certain jobs I would. fire, police
Most jobs I would not
Sure. But where to draw that line? I can imagine companies will want them for liability reasons.
I imagine if my occupation includes carrying a gun, interacting with citizens, and a historically high rate of extrajudicial deaths amongst people I am supposed to be protecting. A publicly accessible camera would be beneficial to easing the minds of those I interact with and providing evidence for any actual instances where I felt my life was threatened.
Draw the line at jobs where someone wields authority over the public, disputes can’t be easily resolved after the fact, and the person doing the job moves around too much for fixed cameras to be adequate. I can’t off the top of my head think of an example that isn’t in law enforcement.
If you take away the authority part, you could say that, for example, cleaning personnel should wear body cameras because it’s so easy for them to commit theft, but they’re already treated pretty poorly and I wouldn’t want them humiliated further.
I heartily agree: they should be a tool to serve the public interest. That police can withhold that footage after an incident or have any justification having a camera off in public, I find it reprehensible.
Using it on private citizens feels more like having a cheap overseer…just a tool to punish.
The line I draw currently is this. Jobs that we currently look at and say those persons should have body cams. Police fire rescue.
I’d also add landlords and their staff/assistants should have them. Other than that . No I wouldn’t wear them.
I don’t give a shit what companies want; the only employees that can be legitimately forced to wear such things are those who have obligations to the public.
those who have obligations to the public.
I’m so glad I quit the library.
I bought a dashcam for my vehicle, and choose to use it to protect myself from false accusations.
Body cams should be like dash cams, something used by employees to exonerate the person wearing them.
I’m not a LEO, and I can respect that maybe it’s not this simple… but I would expect “honest” cops to voluntarily wear one to protect themselves from false accusations of abuse of power.
But when it crosses over from protecting the employee to big brother watching over you that’s the line.
Body cams used to protect the wearer - Good Body cams used to punish the wearer - Bad
Imagine an 8 hour livestream of someone banging their head on the keyboard until the code magically fixes itself. Very fun.
Same here. But imagine if you were living in The Fifth Element world of mega-corps. They tell you to wear a camera so they can tell when you’re not working…
There’s monitoring software like that already.
Either they will leave me alone, or they’re gonna end up like Evil Corp. Considering my workplace is a Major Bank, it would make sense.
are you ready to wear one?
I’m ready to make an elton john style jacket full of infrared leds
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Absolutely not, as that would mean my company violates my country’s privacy laws. In my field of work there is no valid reason for wearing a body cam.
Na, I work in IT we have more appropriate spyware than body cameras can ever be.
I work in cinema, recording devices of any ilk are satan and cannot be allowed anywhere near content
ominous
Absolutely not. You can justify it with whatever reasoning you want, but it would be used against employees far more than it helps employees.
Preach. It wasn’t body cams but our company gave us all mandatory phones with custom location tracking software on them. It was done as part of their pandemic response. The phones were supposedly only tracking your location within a mile of the site and were only used for enforcing social distancing and infection tracking. Well when the return to office mandates came around, upper management was suddenly too informed about how much time we spent onsite. They swore up and down it wasn’t the phones and went to pretty absurd lengths to find some other metric to prove it.
If I had to deal with that, the phone would be in a faraday box with a router that connected to a VPN that cycled servers every 24hrs.
Every day they would think I was in a different country.
There’s a reason why they’re my former employer. Upper management was discussing replacing our badges with the phone. We needed the phones to get into the building because that was where the covid protocol pass was kept and security checked. It was impressive how quickly they took advantage of the pandemic to make creepy breeches in privacy.
The company you work for is not your friend. If it is their body can they will use it to their benefit. Any benefit you receive will be incidental or simply part if their propaganda to get you to wear it for them.
It will be used, primarily, to surveil employees. They will track your habits and ensure you are aware that every single thing you do for your shift is something your boss or their boss or their boss can come back to you with and reprimand you for. They will try to set performance targets that can be compared to your videos so they can tell you what an algorithm or a petty middle manager says you are doing wrong. Too much time helping a customer. You’re not folding clothes fast enough. Walk faster. No sitting. They will set keywords. Union. Break. Curse words. Your bosses’ names. They might not even review these things. The intimidation is enough. Maybe you’ll get new policies. See that black guy? Follow him. Get video. The algorithm said to do it so it can’t be racist. We’ll pass it along to the cops.
Companies wouldn’t pay for it if they didn’t see a business angle and the obvious ones are control over employees and being able to use more video for “liability” defense.
Absolutely not. I like my current job, but if body cams became mandatory, I’d quit. I’d get ready to leave if they were ever even “tested” at another location.
Hell no, cops however should have less control over the cameras they wear.
That depends… who controls the footage?
If it’s my employer, absolutely not unless the job is high liability already because then it becomes a liability for me when somebody else controls my data.
If it’s just for me, sure I would wear it if it’s not too much trouble and I have concerns.
Hell no. That would turn anything other than unflinching obsequiousness towards obnoxious clients and potential fraudsters into a firing offense. Specially in the already dystopian US job market.
body cams only make any sense when you’re not in a fixed location and already always on camera, or when there’s commonly abuses of power off camera. both are true of cops. neither are true of the cashiers at Hot Topic or whatever.
True. Today. But should have said I’m imagining a black Mirror future where things are so bad and the tech so cheap, that corps decide they want all employees to wear one, for their use.
In the linked article, public health workers are going to wear a cam so the govt can tell when they break rules, out in the field. I could see that kind of thinking expanded to other fields over time, no?
It occurs to me now that the cashier at hot topic is already being recorded. So good point.
I would absolutely, categorically, stop doing business wherever I see employees wearing bodycams.
You want this for DOCTORS? You want your private health information record like this? Are you freaking nuts?
It’d be on record by the same organisation that has access to your medical records anyway. Doctors are frequently known for abuse of power over disabled patients, trans patients, racialised patients, etc, so it makes it easier to take action against negligent/abusive doctors.
My doctor writes shit on papaerz in a filing cabinet. That’s a whole lot better than digitally where it can easily be mass exfiltrated.
I guess it depends on where you are. Here medical records are on a centralised computer system already.
At least on a centralised computer system one would hope that the state would hire someone competent to set it up and harden it. Whereas there’s only so much you can do to physically protect a piece of paper from being accessed—although I suppose also less likely that malicious actors would try to do a physical heist to steal paper medical records too.
No, I don’t. I’m putting on my tin foil hat here and trying to guess what the future might hold.
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Am waitress, can confirm.
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