Ahhh well, we knew it was only going to get to worse. the latest employee spy software will be out on the market this month. And just in time for the Holidays.
The Xobni software, which should be available for individual use Sept. 20 and is expected to be rolled out to businesses starting this winter, works by measuring the amount of time people spend reading and writing e-mails. From there, Xobni (that's inbox spelled backward) can chart when people send and receive e-mails, as well as how long it takes them to reply to messages.
Wait. It gets better.
"What we can start to do is predict," Brezina says. If an employee wanted to send an e-mail with numerous people copied on it, for example, before that person hits send, a box would pop up saying how many hours that e-mail would cost the company and questioning whether the worker still wanted to send it. "Essentially what we can do is allow people to start to change behaviors," Brezina says.
Uh-huh. How about the amount of time it's going to take me to read the stupid box, think about whether or not I was "sure" and click on the stupid "YES" box every time? Huh, genius?
All time-wasting crap aside, the privacy issues here really bug me. When is it going to end? Why don't you just make me hook into a monitor when I arrive to my desk so that you can monitor my heart rate, breathing and whether or not my lunchtime soda was diet or regular. Or better yet, why don't I just get wired up to brain sensors (I'm assuming that's the next corporate monitoring software being developed in the technology sector) so that you can monitor my every thought when I'm working for you? Then you'd know absolutely everything. That way you can pop up boxes on my screen that ask me whether or not I'm sure that I want to be thinking about how much I hate working for you idiots.
I can see it now. Boxes would be popping up on my screen all day: "Are you sure you have to pee right now?", "To continue repeated feelings of oppression please click 'Next'", "Please confirm deletion of company loyalty thoughts" and finally, "Are you sure you want to get fired today?"
Ugh. It's so much fun being just a faceless piece of data.
Dharmadee(09/06/2006)
It is sickening, and the technology might be new, but the mind-set is not. Before computer technology, the worker bees were just "cogs" in the "wheel of progress". And before that, they owed their souls to the company store. Same ideas, different dictatorships.
Xobni Team(09/14/2006)
"While we appreciate the attention, we feel Xobni is misrepresented." Please see our response to the referenced news article on our blog. www.xobni.com/blog
Dharmadee(09/16/2006)
Dear Xnobi Team-while I appreciate your mindset, allow me to point out that Albert Einstein was a pacifist, and it certainly was not his intention to contribute to the development of the atomic bomb. Sadly-the intentions of the developers of a technology usually do not have a say in how that technology is used or mis-used in the secondary market.
avid reader(09/18/2006)
Misrepresented? Hardly. I think it was right on.
JobSchmobber Community Comments
BPFH (09/05/2006)
So it's an Outlook add-in, eh? Oh, wait, I have local admin privileges... *whistling while I uninstall*
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