Context: Bosses putting a ‘digital leash’ on remote workers could be crossing a privacy line
I wonder if it would be all that difficult to demonstrate that each extra technical and surveillance-oriented component in a system of management and governance is actually more of a burden and cost than is the uncertainty invoked by remote workers being unmonitored. The manifest and sum entropy as degrees of system freedom and heightened probability of security incident or technical failure that technical gadgetry incurs is plausibly far vaster than the ambiguities as to the rectitude and accountability of every minute of employees working lives.
The more components that exist in any system, the higher the dimensionality of that system and the greater the probability that those components – as a whole and on average – will drift into a disordered state. The question that should be asked here is, perhaps, is the benefit of persistent surveillance and monitoring actually outweighed by the unacknowledged burden of complexity and entropy that additional software and hardware artefacts introduce? I think it is and also that this logical fact becomes a solid brick around which issues of ethical impropriety can be quite simply gift-wrapped before delivery.
Surveillance is what is done when managers have no trust and no better ideas.
Daedelus Kite 