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Just for the record, this lady was an outside salesperson.

Not sure why people keep bringing this up as a security feature. If you lose your phone or have it stole, it is an iPhone. They can track and find it for you. The company probably has encryption software on it to prevent personal information. It's a pretty flimsy argument.

Steve has the right of it. She was a salesperson (judging by this thread i think she must have sold nuclear reactors), if she can hit her targets she can do whatever the feth she wants - it's sales. There is no viable reason to track where she is.

 Bullockist wrote:
Steve has the right of it. She was a salesperson (judging by this thread i think she must have sold nuclear reactors), if she can hit her targets she can do whatever the feth she wants - it's sales. There is no viable reason to track where she is.

No reason except corporate control for the sake of corporate control! That's a pretty good reason right?

 Easy E wrote:

 Bullockist wrote:
Steve has the right of it. She was a salesperson (judging by this thread i think she must have sold nuclear reactors), if she can hit her targets she can do whatever the feth she wants - it's sales. There is no viable reason to track where she is.

No reason except corporate control for the sake of corporate control! That's a pretty good reason right?

And now we see why unions still are needed in many ways.

 Frazzled wrote:

 Easy E wrote:

 Bullockist wrote:
Steve has the right of it. She was a salesperson (judging by this thread i think she must have sold nuclear reactors), if she can hit her targets she can do whatever the feth she wants - it's sales. There is no viable reason to track where she is.

No reason except corporate control for the sake of corporate control! That's a pretty good reason right?

And now we see why unions still are needed in many ways.

I don't think there is a salesperson union in the US.

 kronk wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:

 Easy E wrote:

 Bullockist wrote:
Steve has the right of it. She was a salesperson (judging by this thread i think she must have sold nuclear reactors), if she can hit her targets she can do whatever the feth she wants - it's sales. There is no viable reason to track where she is.

No reason except corporate control for the sake of corporate control! That's a pretty good reason right?

And now we see why unions still are needed in many ways.

I don't think there is a salesperson union in the US.

Sounds like an opportunity for a good saleswoman!

 Bullockist wrote:
Steve has the right of it. She was a salesperson (judging by this thread i think she must have sold nuclear reactors), if she can hit her targets she can do whatever the feth she wants - it's sales. There is no viable reason to track where she is.

Of course there is a reason. You can see if she eats at McDonald's a lot and whether that will eventually affect your company's insurance contributions. If she is out drinking most nights you can see that she may have a problem and not work as hard the next day, or why she comes in late. If she is single and always at a married man's house then you have leverage

[/sarc]

Based on the article, I need some more information.

Does she driver own vehicle or does she have a company vehicle? I would argue that the company has the ability to track her driving habits in their vehicle.

Next, it is a company paid phone and if you signed an affidavit not to change the software required to perform your job function then you can be terminated. If you don't like the GPS tracking, then leave the phone at home. Based on the job description from the original article, she is a sales person. Not IT, not a doctor, and not someone who needs to be on call. Just get your own personal phone and use it when you get off work.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/13/8597081/worker-gps-fired-myrna-arias-xora

"A woman in California claims to have been fired from her job after uninstalling an app on her smartphone that her employer used to track her movements 24 hours a day. Myrna Arias, a former employee of money transfer firm Intermex, says she was told to keep her phone on at all times and was dismissed weeks after being "scolded" for uninstalling the app. She's now suing Intermex for violating her privacy and wrongful termination, among other allegations.

"[Arias' boss] Stubits admitted that employees would be monitored while off duty, and bragged that he knew how fast she was driving at specific moments ever since she had installed the app on her phone," reads the complaint, filed in Kern County Superior Court and spotted by ArsTechnica.

"[Arias] expressed that she had no problem with the app’s GPS function during work hours, but she objected to the monitoring of her location during non-work hours," says the filing. "She likened the app to a prisoner’s ankle bracelet and informed Stubits that his actions were illegal. Stubits replied that she should tolerate the illegal intrusion because Intermix was paying [her more than her previous employer]."

When Arias complained to Stubits, he told her that she was required to keep her phone powered on throughout the day. The app — Xora StreetSmart — is intended to let companies manage employees working away from the office.

Its creators, ClickSoftware, says it lets firms "see the location of every mobile worker on a Google Map." However, ClickSoftware doesn't seem to envision the app as a 24-hour tracker, telling potential clients that "field employees" should launch the app "when [they] start their day."

Arias is currently suing Intermex for damages "in excess of $500,000" for lost earnings and wages, with her filing stating that "this intrusion would be highly offensive to a reasonable person." Intermex could not be reached for comment at the time of writing."

Emphasis mine.

This seems to put several lines of conversation to rest. She was expected to always have the phone, and to have it powered on. When confronted, they basically said "we're paying you more, suck it up", and the app creators themselves note that it's for tracking employees during work hours, not for security.

Surely GPS-tagging someone without their consent is illegal in the US? I assume so, at least based on the massive gakstorm that has come up in the past regarding Law Enforcement doing exactly that to people's cars.

 Forar wrote:

Surely GPS-tagging someone without their consent is illegal in the US? I assume so, at least based on the massive gakstorm that has come up in the past regarding Law Enforcement doing exactly that to people's cars.

Well, yes, but you give that consent when you start working there. You may or may not realize it. That's the way a lot of practices are here.

That doesn't make them right. What makes it worse are the hardworking members of the prole that love their corporate overlords so much they'll jump to accusing someone of being a 'pinko commie' or whatever if they try to object or make trouble over it.

I hope she does very well. These people need to be reigned in a little.

It's a funny thing to give consent to. Is it specifically in her contract? I'm sure having a phone is, but did it explicitly say that she had to agree to being tracked at all times or was that something they tried to slip on when getting a new phone or somesuch? The idea that you can be told to 'put up with an illegal intrusion or leave your job' is ridiculous. What's the point in even having laws if companies can easily get away with browbeating employees with threats against their job if they don't 'agree' to illegal surveillance? Absurd.

Is it really illegal if there are laws for it?

You can't (at least in the UK) be asked to sign a contract to do something that is, in itself, illegal,

and if you do the contact (or just that part of it is void)

so it would all hang on whether a judge decided the intial contact was legal

 Dreadwinter wrote:
Hypothetical reactor tech works in an industry providing a public service. Hypothetical reactor tech endangers lives when they do not respond to calls.

This lady does not. Do you see the difference Orlanth?

Indeed, the point of a reactor tech was brought up so you might understand. I am already there.

Jobs exist that require rapid reaction, some have jobs that react to prevent danger to life - you understand that.
Some have jobs that react to prevent losses of the company concerned - this you evidently still don't understand.

If renumeration is there for a worker to be on call then those are contracted terms.

Well she could still be available by phone even if they don't track her whereabouts. You'd never hang all that responsibility on one person anyway. What if they couldn't respond to the phone due to illness/accident or because they had no phone signal at that moment? It's just a ludicrous example. 'Oh no she's in a building with thick walls, I guess the town will just have to be destroyed.'

What it boils down to is that the company just doesn't trust her to follow her contract and be an available distance away outside work hours. At some point you have to trust people, you don't get to invade their privacy and spy on their whereabouts at all times. It's not reasonable. I suggest if it is a trust issue the company employ someone else that they do trust instead. But I suspect that they wouldn't do this, they want to spy regardless. Lots of jobs have expectations of conduct outside of work hours but it doesn't mean they should be allowed to monitor employees at all times. Be available yes, but your private time should be just that.

I think we're making a lot of assumptions in thinking this is about her being potentially on call outside of work hours. She's a sales exec, and while that often involves working with client relationships outside of work hours, it isn't really a crisis management kind of deal where you have to be ready just in case. It's schmoozing and other nonsense, typically organised well ahead of time.

It's more likely this app is about tracking and quanitfying the amount of work done outside of normal hours - monitoring to see who is spending hours outside of work with current and potential clients.

I have no idea whether that's illegal, but it's almost certainly a bad idea, a really chronic case of micromanagement.

 Orlanth wrote:
That would involve either.
- Phoning them all the time.
- Taking a risk they are where they say they are. In an industry that can't take risks.

Mostly it involves active management - both parties talking about future availability during off work hours. "I will be on call the next three weekends, but the weekend after that I want to travel out of state and won't be available." "Can't give you that weekend as Tommy is already unavailable, but the weekend after is fine."

The idea of needing an app to check on people who are on call is fairly ridiculous.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Bullockist wrote:
Steve has the right of it. She was a salesperson (judging by this thread i think she must have sold nuclear reactors), if she can hit her targets she can do whatever the feth she wants - it's sales. There is no viable reason to track where she is.

Over the last 20 odd years people have been slowly figuring out that simply tracking sales is a pretty crappy metric of an employee's performance, and lots of new metrics have been added since. The problem is that not all sales are the same - lots are made to whales - big, regular buyers who don't need a lot selling - they know your product and know what they want it for and you just have to book the order each month. Looking purely a sales means a guy with a couple of whale customer on his roster looks amazing, while a guy that lacks a whale or two looks bad, even if he's out there every month meeting 50 potential clients a month and adding two or three as clients.

So they look at tracking contact time with buyers (total & new), sales to new customers, sales increases to existing clients, stuff like that.

I suspect this may be part of such an effort - tracking the number of times she met with with buyers, including outside of normal work hours.