How Walmart, Delta, Chevron and Starbucks are using AI to monitor employee messages
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Aware uses AI to analyze companies' employee messages across Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom and other communications services.

Walmart, Delta, Chevron and Starbucks are using AI to monitor employee messages::Aware uses AI to analyze companies’ employee messages across Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom and other communications services.

  • TootSweet@lemmy.worldEnglish
    46·
    9 months ago

    There’s going to be an article one of these days in Business Insider or something saying “employees increasingly establishing secret outside-of-the-company communication channels and sharing trade secrets over them.” And then the companies are going to get all pissy about “muh trade secritssssss” and issue nagging emails to the whole company not to set up Discords to evade their employee monitoring solution that they pay a gorillion dollars a year for. And because it was the CEO’s idea, he can’t just back down and admit it was wrong. He has to keep doubling down.

    Meme format of Principle Skinner from The Simpsons reflecting in the first panel "Am I so out of touch?" and in the second panel saying "No, it's the employees who are wrong."

    • Noxy@yiffit.netEnglish
      7·
      9 months ago

      That’s a really interesting point. By forcing more surveillance of casual chat, they’re also risking confidential information being discussed on outside channels.

      • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2·
        9 months ago

        I would assume that for any reasonably large business, with a competant legal team, there is a certain amount of this considered to be an acceptable risk.

        Employees discussing shit on your systems? You’re (most likely) legally responsible for it if things come to a court room. Employees discussing shit through their own side channels? You’ve got plausible deniability of awareness and a strong legal argument for it being outside of your responsibilty due to having no control of it.

        This is literally a strategy for some shady and unscrupulous companies to attempt to avoid liability. Conduct any questionable communication over official “unofficial” third party channels.

    • JDubbleu@programming.devEnglish
      2·
      9 months ago

      This is already a thing. I’m part of a 25k person Discord server for Amazon/AWS employees both current and former. We often discussed a ton about the company’s inner workings, navigating the toxic AF environment, and helping people find other jobs. Nothing ever trade secret level, but that Discord would give any competitor a massive leg up in direct competition with Amazon.

      • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2·
        9 months ago

        It’s in the business’s best interest that any questionable discussions happen outside of their systems.

        The simultaneous chances of data exfiltration are a considered risk, and there are already legal actions available to the business for that aspect of it. This is effectively a solved problem.