Teleperformance, one of the world’s largest companies offering call-center services to Big Tech such as Amazon e Apple, asked some employees working from Colombia to accept one amendment to their contract to allow in their homesuse of cameras managed by artificial intelligence.
The company declared that it respects the rights of workers and the motivation for the choice, verifies compliance with company rules and maintains adequate levels of safety, is not in itself inadmissible. Indeed, it could even be said that it is required by the complex regulations on corporate liability and on the protection of personal data to which a multinational must comply.
This does not mean that the diffusion of control technologies and the growing delegation of operations to software with varying degrees of autonomy pose quite serious questions that are independent of the specific case of Teleperformance and also concern the use (in Italy) of proctoring software to remotely check university students’ exams. The concern raised by the news of the new contractual conditions of Teleperformance is theinvasion of family and personal space caused by the disappearance of the wall that divides the workplace from private life. However, this is not the only problem.
Privacy is a right, not a “bureaucratic hitch”
by Diletta Huyskes
Every (more or less) Western country has a law to protect the dignity of people. Therefore situations (which are not new) can be managed, in fact, within the framework of what each country allows. If it is necessary (in Italy it is forbidden) to simply inform the worker or acquire his consent to be monitored, never mind: the human resources department will prepare the change to the contract and communicate the new conditions. If elsewhere the rules are different, they will be followed. The problem is solved. However, we should ask ourselves whether formal compliance with the law is sufficient to seriously guarantee the dignity, even before the right, of a person.
When survival needs prevail over rights, the person to whom a contract is proposed, which includes (as in this case) substantial invasions of family spaces, sign without reading the clauses small print. This means, in other words, that companies may find it more advantageous outsource production processes and services in countries where the propensity to accept more onerous conditions is higher. Thus it is possible to exercise more pervasive control than is allowed in the First World and to replicate one assembly line surveillance Fordist style. It will be out of fashion to use such categories, but given the current state of affairs it is difficult to avoid it.
We are facing a situation different from that typical of the relationship with less developed countries, where clients increase profits by taking advantage ofabsence of rules or controls. Rather, the issue under discussion is the loss of meaning of the concept of right to the benefit of individual economic necessity or satisfaction. In other words, we are faced with a change induced by information technologies that manifests itself in allowing Big Tech and their supply chain to reduce the law, and therefore rights, to little more than a few sentences that on paper make the right thing but in fact it denies the humanity of the person facing them.
Nothing different, however, from what is happening with the privacy of individuals, whose protection is entrusted to a few banners or a few clicks, or with the freedom of expression subjected by large platforms to automated controls, post cancellations or account closures every time some behavior is considered, it is not known by whom, inappropriate . At the rights crisis Hence, the crisis of the law has been going on for years as an instrument that should have guaranteed and applied them. All this, in the deafening silence of politics.
gdpr
Thus a European regulation defended our privacy
by Andrea Daniele Signorelli
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