Electronic badge monitors workers' conversations, toilet usage and posture

Rob Beschizza 6:11 am Mon Oct 21, 2019

The Economist reports that a tech startup sells a surveillance and control badge for the workforce. The device monitors workers' conversations and tracks their movements. You can even use it to make them sit straight.

A technology company has created an electronic badge that can monitor workers' conversations, posture and even time spent in the toilet pic.twitter.com/L55v9PRrzp

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) October 21, 2019

The company that makes the creepy "sociometric" combadge has a creepy name — Humanyze — and its marketing is a cold wall of data jargon. The CEO and co-founder, Ben Waber, is an MIT Media Lab alumnus who boasts that he "literally wrote the book on People Analytics" and who published research on having workers take coffee breaks together to improve their productivity.

If it weren't reality, it would be too crudely dystopian to pass muster as fiction.

"I literally wrote the book on People Analytics. You're spending WAY too long on the toilet"

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