Voice Profiling

[ysabetwordsmith]

People use voice profiling and recording to spy on each other.

Shit like this is why I refuse to be recorded.  And that means there are things I can't get, especially services.  Remember, it's not consent if there are consequences to either choice.

Also bear in mind that when a society routinely pressures or forces people to do things they don't want, or abuses them for making choices that annoy those in power, you wind up with a really rape-friendly nation like America.  >_<

Comments

[thewayne]

*sigh*

I worked retail in the late '70s and early '80s. I guess it's just not enough to be knowledgeable about your products and nice to people anymore. Especially since for the most part you don't have sales people anymore and everything's online. So now everyone has to take happy pills and smile and put on a happy face?

There's a reason why I don't want devices listening to me and responding to my voice in my house.

[(Anonymous)]

I've worked retail more recently and I was very uncomftorable with pushing the membership program.

(We were supposed to ask 2x in a transaction for nonmembers, and we needed a certain % of members to nonmembers.)

[thewayne]

I'm SO GLAD we didn't have that crap when I was in sales!  Didn't have mystery shoppers checking up on us, either.

Yes ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

Jobs often demand that people violate their own ethics. Another example is spying on people by demanding their name, home address, phone number, email, etc. so the company can harass them. That overall abuse of ethics is a problem because:

1) It means more ethical people quit or get fired, making it hard for them to find work and survive, which makes ethics counter-survival and thus less appealing.

2) It rewards people who have no ethics, or are willing to violate theirs on request or for a sufficient payoff. This tends to fill businesses with unethical employees. And as employers have found out, they don't just screw the customers. Unethical people also steal supplies, malinger on the job, create costly scandals, and otherwise make it harder for the business to succeed.

3) Moral injury tends to exceed the current capability of the health industry to heal. People sort of try to help if they believe it's a real problem -- which many don't -- but they're not trained in how to treat injured souls. Modern religions aren't much better at it. And you can't fix that kind of problem in an environment that compounds it anyway. So it's ubiquitous in some fields such as the health industry.

Re: Yes ...

[(Anonymous)]

I've heard of cases where the only eople who meet the impossible metrics...are the ones who fraudulently sign people up. And then if they're caught, they get fired.

Re: Yes ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

That's also true in debt collection. There are rules to protect people from malicious behavior by debt collectors. Following these rules results in a very low rate of collection. Abusing or assaulting people results in a much higher rate of debt collection. So employees are left to decide whether they prefer to break the law, hurt people, and possibly get punished; or lose their job.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> I worked retail in the late '70s and early '80s. I guess it's just not enough to be knowledgeable about your products and nice to people anymore. Especially since for the most part you don't have sales people anymore and everything's online. So now everyone has to take happy pills and smile and put on a happy face? <<

There has always been pressure on retail and customer service personnel to do a lot of emotional labor to make others happy. What's new is the increasing amount of tools available to bosses to spy on employees and pressure them to meet those demands -- which is dangerous to health, which runs up medical expenses and thus eats into the bottom line.

>> There's a reason why I don't want devices listening to me and responding to my voice in my house. <<

Same here. The problem is, that's not enough. The spytech is spreading throughout society. If you want to visit someone else's home, or any other location, you need to make sure they don't have voice-activated tech in it. And if you need any kind of service that requires calling someone on the phone, it's all but impossible to get privacy -- they simply won't provide the service unless you "agree" to be spied on.

So that also undermines the concept of what consent even is. The technical definition is "agreement without consequences attached to any choice" but the way people use the word is "obtain what you want by any means necessary."

Re: Thoughts

[(Anonymous)]

>>There has always been pressure on retail and customer service personnel to do a lot of emotional labor to make others happy.<<

Discussed in the comments for letter #1 [How to Handle a Creep at Someone Else's Workplace] here:

https://www.askamanager.org/2021/06/how-to-handle-a-creep-at-someone-elses-workplace-should-i-return-to-the-office-if-im-immunocompromised-and-more.html

>>What's new is the increasing amount of tools available to bosses to spy on employees and pressure them to meet those demands...<<

What bothers me is these demands are often things the worker has no control over.

Take timers at the drive-through: it is the worker's responsibility to make the times low, but the worker has no control over if the customer is still thinking, is having an argument with their kids, refuses to move because they are mad they can't use a coupon, etc.

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> What bothers me is these demands are often things the worker has no control over. <<

Or can only control in ways that are less ethical, more manipulative, etc.

This is a key reason why the stress runs high enough to ruin health.

It's not just emotional, though. Amazon injures its warehouse workers by using spytech to push "efficiency" in ways that exceed the healthy performance of the human body. A supervisor can sometimes be slipped around for a bathroom break or a few minutes' rest. A computer or a camera, not so much.

Re: Thoughts

[(Anonymous)]

I was fortunate enough to have good compassionate bosses.

So we had to stand at the registers, but they let me take an early lunch and use a chair the one time I almost fainted from low blood sugar, or on another occasion prefaced "You cant sit here" with "I know you don't feel well, but..."

They were also fairly good with communication, and problem solving, and delegating tasks by a person's skills.

So anyone who hung around for awhile was pretty loyal.