JOE BIDEN SAYS MUCK PROGRESSIVES, I MADE MY DIRTY MONEY SERVING WALL STREET!
“Hauser also didn’t like the prevalence of Big Law talent on the Department of Justice team, which signaled to him that the Biden administration could go soft on corporate malefactors.”
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/joe-bidens-america-to-be-ruled-by-wall.html
“Joe Biden’s transition is absolutely stacked with tech industry
players,” noted Protocol, an online publication
that covers technology.”
“He was presumably referring to the two dozen agency review team
officials who come from law firms like Arnold & Porter. Or to the 40
or so members of the Biden transition who are current or recent lobbyists.”
“During the summer, the American Prospect published a lengthy
exposé about Biden’s foreign policy advisers’ lucrative foray into corporate America. Many are set to
return to the highest echelons of official Washington.”
Microsoft’s new “Productivity Score” helps employers spy on workers
Microsoft has expanded the analytics provided with its Office 365 suite of productivity applications into a “full-fledged workplace surveillance tool” according to privacy advocates.
The tool, called Productivity Score, allows employers to know the number of days a person was active on Microsoft Word, Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, Skype and Teams over the previous four weeks and on what type of device.
The software gives managers access to 73 pieces of granular data about employee behaviors, all of which is associated with employees by name. Microsoft denies the software is workplace surveillance, but privacy advocates say it most certainly is.
Vienna-based researcher Wolfie Christl tweeted a screenshot of the Productivity Score dashboard, writing that “Esoteric metrics based on analyzing extensive data about employee activities has been mostly the domain of fringe software vendors. Now it’s built into MS 365.”
“A new feature to calculate ‘productivity scores’ turns Microsoft 365 into a full-fledged workplace surveillance tool,” Christl added.
Microsoft claims that the software is not designed as a tool to monitor employee work output activities. A September blog post by Anthony Smith, introducing the product, claimed, “we safeguard against this type of use by not providing specific information on individualized actions, and instead only analyze user-level data aggregated over a 28-day period, so you can’t see what a specific employee is working on at a given time. Productivity Score was built to help you understand how people are using the productivity tools and how well the underlying technology supports them in this.”
In an email to The Register Christl refuted the software giant’s claim, saying the system “does clearly monitor employee activities.” He referenced Microsoft’s own promotional video which shows a list of clearly identifiable users. Posting the video on Twitter, Christl wrote: “Employers/managers can analyze employee activities at the individual level (!), for example, the number of days an employee has been sending emails, using the chat, using ‘mentions’ in emails etc.”
While Productivity Score is not enabled by default, when companies enable it, the software automatically shows data on individual employees. Employers can anonymize user data or opt out of using user-level data at all, but managers have to manually change the settings. Employees have no control over this whatsoever.
The software dashboard provides a so-called peer benchmark, which measures the company against other companies for each metric collected, meaning companies using the product are sending analytics data back to Microsoft.
The documentation for Productivity Score shows the extent of workplace surveillance the software allows. “Person metrics” include data such as the number of hours a person spent in meetings and on email outside of working hours and the number of emails sent. The system also monitors “low-quality meeting hours” which is defined as, the “Number of meeting hours in which an attendee multitasked, attended a conflicting meeting, or attended a meeting that exhibits Redundancy (organizational).”
Employees are assigned an “influence” score “that indicates how well connected a person is within the company. A higher score means that the person is better connected and has greater potential to drive change.” The product documentation states. The software also has a “Diverse tie score” indicating how varied and broad a person’s connections are and a “Strong tie score” recording how many “strong and tight engagements a person has had.”
J.S. Nelson is an associate professor of law at Villanova University who studies workplace surveillance. She told Forbes the software is “horrendous.” “Why are they monitoring people this way and what is that telling people about the relationship they should have with their employers in the workplace? What message are you sending?” she asked.
More invasive employee monitoring tools such as Teramind can capture any user activity, including screen recordings, live views of employee computers, and track emails, keystrokes and even video sessions. These are specialized products and regarded as overly intrusive by many workers.
A Computerworld article from October this year examined how COVID-19 and the move to remote working has spurred faster adoption of employee monitoring software by companies seeking to boost productivity and spy on workers outside of the office.
The article quotes Brian Kropp, group vice president of Gartner’s HR practice. “When COVID-19 hit, we found that within the first month, 16 percent of companies put new tracking software on the laptops of remote employees,” Kropp said. By July that number had risen to 26 percent of companies.
Kropp said that even before the pandemic, companies were moving in the direction of “passively monitoring our employees, listening to them and watching them, and asking them less and less.”
“What the pandemic has done is just accelerate the speed at which that is happening. ... They were going to get there eventually; the pandemic has just accelerated the future into the present,” Kropp said.
The development of Productivity Score now gives companies similar tools without the need to roll out new software. The near-ubiquitous presence of Office 365 in the workplace gives employers ready-made surveillance of their employees.
While the office suite market is dominated by Google with 59.41 percent, Microsoft Office 365 is used by over a million companies worldwide with close to 600,000 companies in the US alone. Under conditions of a global pandemic that has forced the closure of offices around the world and enforced remote working from home, Microsoft is giving corporations the tools to drive up productivity and monitor workers’ activity 24 hours a day.
The metrics provided by Productivity Score will be used by corporations to identify low scoring employees and facilitate more layoffs with increased exploitation of those remaining, under an ever-present pressure to improve their scores.
OLIGARCHY – BILLIONAIRES,
BANKSTERS AND BAILOUTS
Biden’s Chief of Staff
Worked on Behalf of Big Tech for Endless H-1B Visas
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/joe-bidens-america-to-be-ruled-by-wall.html
“Joe Biden’s transition is absolutely stacked with tech industry
players,” noted Protocol, an online publication that
covers technology.
Hauser also didn’t like the prevalence of Big Law talent on the
Department of Justice team, which signaled to him that the Biden administration
could go soft on corporate malefactors.
THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS
WAGES WAR ON AMERICA!
"GOP estb. is using the $5 billion border-wall fight
to hide up to four blue/white-
collar cheap-labor programs in lame-duck DHS budget.
Donors are worried that
salaries are too damn high, & estb. media does
not want to know."
TOP EVIL CORPORATIONS LOOTING AMERICA
Goldman Sachs TRUMP
CRONIES – CLINTON CRONIES – BIDEN CRONIES
JPMorgan Chase
OBAMA CRONIES
ExxonMobil THEY ALL
KISS BIG OIL’S ASS
Halliburton BUSH CRIME FAMILY CRONIES
British American
Tobacco
Dow Chemical
DuPont
Bayer
Microsoft
Google CLINTON
CRONIES, BIDEN CRONIES
Facebook OBAMA
CRONIES, BIDEN CRONIES
Amazon BIDEN
CRONIES
Walmart
Amazon Joins Your Alexa Devices Together with Your Neighbors in a ‘Shared Network’ HIvemind
E-commerce giant Amazon is facing a privacy backlash over its new “Sidewalk” feature which joins together Alexa-powered smart devices within your home with those belonging to neighbors. The company claims the “shared network” will help “devices work better.” One cybersecurity expert called Amazon’s new service “deeply problematic from a privacy perspective,” noting that “No one rides on my WiFi for free, especially a giant corporation with billions of dollars.”
MSN reports that e-commerce giant Amazon is facing backlash for its new Sidewalk feature which automatically turns Alexa-powered smart devices into shared networks. Amazon customers are automatically entered into the Sidewalk program which will connect Alex devices to other nearby devices, even those owned by someone else. Users can disable the feature from their Alexa app.
The Sidewalk program uses Alexa devices including Echo and Ring video doorbells to create a “shared network” aimed at helping “devices work better.” Amazon told users in a recent email that the program allows nearby devices to use a portion of a neighbor’s WiFi bandwidth so devices can have more range.
On a launch page, Amazon stated: “These Bridge devices share a small portion of your internet bandwidth which is pooled together to provide these services to you and your neighbors. And when more neighbors participate, the network becomes even stronger.”
Amazon also published a research paper detailing the technology behind Sidewalk in anticipation of privacy concerns. The paper includes the steps taken by Amazon to keep users’ data private and concluded that privacy was one of the “foundational principles” of Sidewalk’s design.
The report’s authors stated: “By sharing a small portion of their home network bandwidth, neighbors give a little – but get a lot in return.” However, many are skeptical as to whether a network system such as Sidewalk could realistically keep user data private.
Alan Woodward, a professor at the University of Surrey specializing in cybersecurity, told BBC News in an interview that Sidewalk should be an opt-in feature rather than an opt-out feature as it currently is, adding, “It feels wrong not knowing what your device is connected to.”
The chief information security officer at Cyjax, Ian Thornton-Trump, told Forbes that the launch was “deeply problematic from a privacy perspective.” He added: “The ‘on by default’ approach is not consumer-friendly. No one rides on my WiFi for free, especially a giant corporation with billions of dollars.”
An Amazon representative confirmed in a statement that the program was automatically enabled for existing customers, stating: “But well before Sidewalk launches, we will notify existing customers with eligible Bridge devices so they can consider the benefits of Sidewalk before deciding if they want to change their preferences. After all existing customers are notified, all customers setting up a Sidewalk Bridge for the first time will have the opportunity to enable Sidewalk during device setup. All customers will have the option to change their Sidewalk preferences anytime in their Alexa app or Ring Control Center settings.”
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com
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