If body cams get cheaper and cheaper, companies might start asking more people to wear them while working.
E.g.: https://coloradosun.com/2024/07/31/youth-corrections-audio-surveillance/
I could see this for doctors, at restaurants, stores,, etc… eventually.
Are you ready to wear one?
EDIT TO ADD: A few people said this wouldn’t ever make sense for doctors (privacy laws) or for fixed locations (stores). I should have thought of that.
But what about Uber / bus drivers, or repair people who go into homes? I can imagine a large corporation thinking a cam is a good idea, for their own CYA (not for the customers’ or the employees’).
Also I don’t like this idea either, to be clear. I was mostly playing devil’s advocate here to see what you all think. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Pretty much what I expected, tbh
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Certain jobs I would. fire, police
Most jobs I would not
Sure. But where to draw that line? I can imagine companies will want them for liability reasons.
I imagine if my occupation includes carrying a gun, interacting with citizens, and a historically high rate of extrajudicial deaths amongst people I am supposed to be protecting. A publicly accessible camera would be beneficial to easing the minds of those I interact with and providing evidence for any actual instances where I felt my life was threatened.
The line I draw currently is this. Jobs that we currently look at and say those persons should have body cams. Police fire rescue.
I’d also add landlords and their staff/assistants should have them. Other than that . No I wouldn’t wear them.
I don’t give a shit what companies want; the only employees that can be legitimately forced to wear such things are those who have obligations to the public.
I bought a dashcam for my vehicle, and choose to use it to protect myself from false accusations.
Body cams should be like dash cams, something used by employees to exonerate the person wearing them.
I’m not a LEO, and I can respect that maybe it’s not this simple… but I would expect “honest” cops to voluntarily wear one to protect themselves from false accusations of abuse of power.
But when it crosses over from protecting the employee to big brother watching over you that’s the line.
Body cams used to protect the wearer - Good Body cams used to punish the wearer - Bad
Na, I work in IT we have more appropriate spyware than body cameras can ever be.
ominous
are you ready to wear one?
I’m ready to make an elton john style jacket full of infrared leds
I fucking love this idea!!!
Absolutely not, as that would mean my company violates my country’s privacy laws. In my field of work there is no valid reason for wearing a body cam.
Absolutely not. You can justify it with whatever reasoning you want, but it would be used against employees far more than it helps employees.
Preach. It wasn’t body cams but our company gave us all mandatory phones with custom location tracking software on them. It was done as part of their pandemic response. The phones were supposedly only tracking your location within a mile of the site and were only used for enforcing social distancing and infection tracking. Well when the return to office mandates came around, upper management was suddenly too informed about how much time we spent onsite. They swore up and down it wasn’t the phones and went to pretty absurd lengths to find some other metric to prove it.
If I had to deal with that, the phone would be in a faraday box with a router that connected to a VPN that cycled servers every 24hrs.
Every day they would think I was in a different country.
There’s a reason why they’re my former employer. Upper management was discussing replacing our badges with the phone. We needed the phones to get into the building because that was where the covid protocol pass was kept and security checked. It was impressive how quickly they took advantage of the pandemic to make creepy breeches in privacy.
Hell no, cops however should have less control over the cameras they wear.
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Am waitress, can confirm.
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I would absolutely, categorically, stop doing business wherever I see employees wearing bodycams.
There are things that I do where a body cam would be useful, but I wouldn’t wear it for office work.
You want this for DOCTORS? You want your private health information record like this? Are you freaking nuts?
It’d be on record by the same organisation that has access to your medical records anyway. Doctors are frequently known for abuse of power over disabled patients, trans patients, racialised patients, etc, so it makes it easier to take action against negligent/abusive doctors.
My doctor writes shit on papaerz in a filing cabinet. That’s a whole lot better than digitally where it can easily be mass exfiltrated.
I guess it depends on where you are. Here medical records are on a centralised computer system already.
At least on a centralised computer system one would hope that the state would hire someone competent to set it up and harden it. Whereas there’s only so much you can do to physically protect a piece of paper from being accessed—although I suppose also less likely that malicious actors would try to do a physical heist to steal paper medical records too.
No, I don’t. I’m putting on my tin foil hat here and trying to guess what the future might hold.
The ticket checkers (or whatever they are called) wear them here. I guess primarily for their own safety because people can get really mad at them.
body cams only make any sense when you’re not in a fixed location and already always on camera, or when there’s commonly abuses of power off camera. both are true of cops. neither are true of the cashiers at Hot Topic or whatever.
True. Today. But should have said I’m imagining a black Mirror future where things are so bad and the tech so cheap, that corps decide they want all employees to wear one, for their use.
In the linked article, public health workers are going to wear a cam so the govt can tell when they break rules, out in the field. I could see that kind of thinking expanded to other fields over time, no?
It occurs to me now that the cashier at hot topic is already being recorded. So good point.
I might be wearing my own small, undetectable body cam, to protect myself against workplace harassment, racism, and unfair labor practices.
I’m a walking, talking landmine for those bastards. /S
I don’t think it’s going to happen that way. Body cams are needed if you want to record people working in the field, such as police officers, but for people working at a fixed location, an office or factory or what have you, CCTV cameras are cheaper, less intrusive, and harder for a bad actor to screw with by “accidentally” covering their lens or forgetting to turn their unit on.
