2y ago

Leaked screenshot shows Amazon is now tracking individual employee office attendance records, reversing its anonymized data policy

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2y ago

Leaked screenshot shows Amazon is now tracking individual employee office attendance records, reversing its anonymized data policy

www.businessinsider.com /amazon-forced-rto-tracking-employee-office-attendance-2023-9

12 comments

Anonymized data as a concept has always been a joke. With enough data points, the origin can usually be traced.
- Anonymized data as a concept has always been a joke. With enough data points, the origin can usually be traced.
  The design goal of anonimized data is that it is processed to explicitly disallow tracing. This means not only removing personally identifiable information but also disallow session data.
  
  But the data itself can and does lead to tracking. Personalized online advertising isn't decided by magic.
Does Amazon pay well enough to justify staying there? Isn't it one of the most parsimonious and cut-throat company out there? Make billions but pay their workers shit, is what I came to hear, but dunno how true that is.
- Their workers are actually paid decent wages. It's just that Amazon also tries extracting every ounce of productivity they can from them.
  
  Yeah I've always heard that Amazon pays quite well. The only issue is that they'd work you to death in their warehouses if possible. It's a job that's good for quick cash but should never be a career.
- Does Amazon pay well enough to justify staying there?
  That's hard to tell, because everyone tends to stick with the best job they could have.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The new badge report for individual employees is a reversal from Amazon's previous policy of only tracking anonymized, aggregated office attendance data, which it said was shared with managers, primarily for safety and space planning purposes.
For example, at a recent internal townhall meeting, Amazon's SVP Peter DeSantis told his engineering team that office badging data is "informational" and only shared in "very aggregated ways," as Insider previously reported.
In an email to Insider, Amazon's spokesperson Rob Munoz said badge data does not account for reported paid-time off, personal time, or work from a non-corporate building.
The memo added badge data is not available to employees in Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Korea, or Taiwan.
"We're providing this data to help guide conversations as needed between employees and managers about coming into the office with their colleagues," said the memo, obtained by Insider.
Amazon's CEO Andy Jassy, meanwhile, told employees in an internal meeting last month that it's "past" the time to commit to the company's RTO policy, saying "it's probably not going to work out" for those refusing to comply.
The original article contains 547 words, the summary contains 182 words. Saved 67%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

12 comments