Date:02/02/17

Workplace AI makes it all too easy to track you on the job

A new type of artificially intelligent (AI) software could mean your boss could track your every move with the help of an algorithm.
 
Software to better understand human behaviour in the workplace and build artificial intelligence is currently being offered by a London start-up called StatusToday. 
 
The company was given a helping-hand by British intelligence agency GCHQ, which offers advice and financial investment.
 
Their programme relies on a large amount of information about what employees are doing online.
 
By having access to workplace knowledge, their systems will be able to flag up things that look like they might compromise company security.
 
StatusToday has already  detected cases of ex-employees forgetting to delete company information and machines being compromised due to external hacks.
 
 'All of this gives us a fingerprint of a user, so if we think the fingerprint doesn't match, we raise an alert,' the chief technology officer at StatusToday, Mircea Dumitrescu, told the New Scientist.
 
'We're not monitoring if your computer has a virus,' said Mr Dumitrescu. 'We're monitoring human behaviour.'
 
The company says it is not helping bosses track suspicious behaviour but is collecting information to prevent security risks to the company.
 
However, AI could also be used to track employee productivity.
 
Yahoo boss Marissa Mayer banned employees from working remotely because she believed 'speed and quality' were often sacrificed.
 
'We can actually quantify if this is true for individual employees,' said Mr Dumitrescu.
 
'Whether they should be allowed to work from home can then be based on data.'
 
However, Javier Ruiz Diaz, policy director at digital campaigning organisation the Open Rights Group was concerned about the development of AI in the workplace.
 
'You do not loose all your privacy rights when you walk into work', he told MailOnline.
 
'Employers cannot simply syphon off all the communications of their workers to run black box analytics.
 
'Employees must be given clarity about what information is collected, how it is processed and what are the consequences', he added.
 
However, some experts have warned  monitoring people in this way could have adverse effects by making them change how they work.
 
 'If people know they're being monitored, they can change their behaviour to game the system', said Dr Phil Legg at the University of the West of England.
 
This suggests that flagging unusual behaviour will never catch every security risk, even if it can stop people browsing Facebook instead of doing work.
 
Dr Paul Bernal, a lecturer in Information Technology, Intellectual Property and Media Law at the University of East Anglia told MailOnline he thought it could allow employers to get hold of some really intimate information.
 
'Things like sexuality, political beliefs and religion can be 'guessed' with increasing levels of accuracy by monitoring web-browsing, for example - and whether we should be happy with our employers being able to know this kind of thing about us is a very big question', he said. 
 
He believed that surveillance of employees is likely to become more attractive as the technology become cheaper and more 'user-friendly'.
 
'I suspect most people would find it not only creepy but entirely inappropriate', he said.  

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