Would you wear a body cam at work?

perishthethought@lemm.ee to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 51 points –

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.

Draw the line at jobs where someone wields authority over the public, disputes can't be easily resolved after the fact, and the person doing the job moves around too much for fixed cameras to be adequate. I can't off the top of my head think of an example that isn't in law enforcement.

If you take away the authority part, you could say that, for example, cleaning personnel should wear body cameras because it's so easy for them to commit theft, but they're already treated pretty poorly and I wouldn't want them humiliated further.

I heartily agree: they should be a tool to serve the public interest. That police can withhold that footage after an incident or have any justification having a camera off in public, I find it reprehensible.

Using it on private citizens feels more like having a cheap overseer...just a tool to punish.

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.

those who have obligations to the public.

I'm so glad I quit the library.

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

Imagine an 8 hour livestream of someone banging their head on the keyboard until the code magically fixes itself. Very fun.

Same here. But imagine if you were living in The Fifth Element world of mega-corps. They tell you to wear a camera so they can tell when you're not working...

There's monitoring software like that already.

Either they will leave me alone, or they're gonna end up like Evil Corp. Considering my workplace is a Major Bank, it would make sense.

are you ready to wear one?

I'm ready to make an elton john style jacket full of infrared leds

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.

Na, I work in IT we have more appropriate spyware than body cameras can ever be.

I work in cinema, recording devices of any ilk are satan and cannot be allowed anywhere near content

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.

The company you work for is not your friend. If it is their body can they will use it to their benefit. Any benefit you receive will be incidental or simply part if their propaganda to get you to wear it for them.

It will be used, primarily, to surveil employees. They will track your habits and ensure you are aware that every single thing you do for your shift is something your boss or their boss or their boss can come back to you with and reprimand you for. They will try to set performance targets that can be compared to your videos so they can tell you what an algorithm or a petty middle manager says you are doing wrong. Too much time helping a customer. You're not folding clothes fast enough. Walk faster. No sitting. They will set keywords. Union. Break. Curse words. Your bosses' names. They might not even review these things. The intimidation is enough. Maybe you'll get new policies. See that black guy? Follow him. Get video. The algorithm said to do it so it can't be racist. We'll pass it along to the cops.

Companies wouldn't pay for it if they didn't see a business angle and the obvious ones are control over employees and being able to use more video for "liability" defense.

Absolutely not. I like my current job, but if body cams became mandatory, I’d quit. I’d get ready to leave if they were ever even “tested” at another location.

That depends... who controls the footage?

If it's my employer, absolutely not unless the job is high liability already because then it becomes a liability for me when somebody else controls my data.

If it's just for me, sure I would wear it if it's not too much trouble and I have concerns.

Hell no. That would turn anything other than unflinching obsequiousness towards obnoxious clients and potential fraudsters into a firing offense. Specially in the already dystopian US job market.

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've actually considered it, mainly because it'd be useful for me to document what I do and how while keeping my hands free.

My job involves a lot of hardware troubleshooting, and when people ask me a year later when and how some specific issue was resolved, it'd be a whole lot easier to check the tape.

Yes, taking notes is possible, but when you're troubleshooting an industrial system, and downtime costs 40.000$ per hour, updating your diary isn't exactly a priority.

I don't really have much of a privacy aspect to worry about - the only time it'd be beneficial for anyone would be while doing field work, and at that time I usually have 10-20 people watching and waiting anyway.

I haven't found a durable camera that I can wear discreetly, though.

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.

I would absolutely, categorically, stop doing business wherever I see employees wearing bodycams.

No, I’m still salty they decided we should be on camera for meetings all of a sudden at my job. It’s so pointless and stupid to force us into. Thankfully it hasn’t been strictly enforced but most of us try to comply some of the times. Some mornings I’m too damned tired and don’t want to be seen yawning a bunch or like how it really is, that I literally rolled out of bed a few minutes ago to start my shift.

When I first came to this job, I remember joining a meeting and turned on my camera for someone to tell me “we don’t do that here” and it felt great to not have that stupid corporate pressure for something so trivial at the time.

I can understand wanting to make sure your employees are who they say they are and ensuring they are doing the job they are being paid to do. On the second part, that should be evident by the fact their work is being done. A camera wouldn’t change it for the lazy employees. They would find ways to appear busy on camera and micro managers would find a new way to micro manage people again. On the former, this would be evident with individual meetings on an ongoing basis between employee and direct supervisor.

Neither are necessarily solved by the constant use of a camera, at least where I work.

I suppose there are some jobs where a camera would be beneficial. We all came here with the idea of police officers which makes sense as a precaution for both the cop and the public they work with. (It should) keep everyone accountable and ensure things are being done as they should. But we see even that isn’t necessarily happening. We still get the “oops my camera conveniently tuned itself off during the time they claimed I abused their rights :( ”

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

Just make sure that you're not in a two-party consent state, otherwise even if you catch something egregious being done to you, it may not be admissible as any sort of evidence.

Note that this may not apply if you are in a public area or an area accessible to the public, however, even with that a competent lawyer may be able to get that evidence excluded based on the consent rules in your state or country.

Where I work; the public facing staff, security and customer service roles, are now offered to wear one at the start of their shift. They all want to use one.

These workers face abuse - physical assault, threats, harassment - from members of the public.

What has been found is that when they turn the body worn camera on, the other person tends to stop the abuse or at least de-escalates somewhat. (Prior to having body worn cameras available, some of these staff had tried to use their phone to film when in an incident, but it almost always triggered an immediate violent response - one staff had their phone taken and smashed, another was hit in the face)

There has been a decrease in mental health injury claims since using these. My own talks with these staff are that they feel safer, and had asked their employer to procure more body worn cameras as there wasn’t enough for all the staff.

The staff are not required to have them constantly on, they press a button to switch it on when an aggressive situation is forming or they believe they are in danger.

Why doctors? Filming patients would be a nightmare in terms of privacy and data policy.

In my line of work (psychotherapy) it would be equally impossible. People are having a hard enough time as it is opening up to medical professionals, I don't think that the additional barrier of being actively filmed would help anyone.

Yeah I'm not a doctor but I work in healthcare. Would be a massive HIPAA violation (patient privacy laws).

Check out the linked article. I agree with you but that agency is only adding cameras for the agency's benefit, not the worker's.

Youth corrections staff is still a whole other story than doctors though. A physical examination is probably one of the most vulnerable positions one could be in. These cameras would record people getting naked, multiple orifices being examined, and patients talking about symptoms or things they are unsure and often ashamed about.

The cost would be enormous. I imagine many people would be even more reluctant to go to the doctor than they are now.

And the benefit, in my opinion, would be very slim. Medical malpractice is far more subtle than the examples from the article. As patients we're rarely worried that our doctor will physically assault us, we're worried about errors in judgement, delays in care, and prejudices based on gender, ethnicity, age, sexuality, and so on. And those aren't directly observable most of the time. Even if you get the moment on camera where your doctor decides to trivialize your symptoms you mostly wouldn't be able to prove it happened for discriminatory reasons.

In the jobs I work at, no, I wouldn't. Body cams would only be used to snitch on people. It makes sense for surveillance to be used over people in positions of power like cops, doctors, prison guards, etc, who are known for abusing their power. Not against ordinary people or members of the public though. If retail workers wear bodycams, it's to snitch on shoplifters. If teachers wear bodycams it'd compromise kids who approach them to tell them something in confidence. Etc.

I used to wear one on the railway. We had these ones that you switch on with a big, loud sliding clasp on it, so if someone starts acting a bit shirty, you could often deter them just by starting the recording (which held the previous 30 seconds or something in its memory).

Makes sense, especially if you trusted the organization to use the video to defend you, not just cover their own butts.

There are things that I do where a body cam would be useful, but I wouldn't wear it for office work.

A few of the supermarkets in my country have this as an option for staff. Since the pandemic there's been an alarming rise in public attacking shop staff.

This. Yes. I would just find a new job, but what if all employers in an industry require body cams?

Sure. Why not? It will probably work like it does with US police officers, magically turning off right before the murder takes place self defence happens.

Seriously, I wouldn’t care at all. But it’s still a stupid idea and I would strongly oppose it. Even if only in solidarity with people it would fuck over.

"Self defence"

Plot twist: you work at Home Depot.

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.

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.

Depends on the pay differential and other options. I think it's less useful for positions in my career, but it's not an absolute no.

Everyone in the building wears one regardless.

My management or owners are not allowed to see the content and it can only be reviewed by a third party arbitration.

If the camera is off I might as well be dead to my employers and coworkers.

My pay increases proportionally to the success of the business.

If I have a gun or am in charge of security, sure. If I’m just flipping burgers, absolutely not. The security camera in the corner is plenty.

Absolutely. No better way to prove that you’ve been mistreated by customers or coworkers.

Oh, yes if you keep control over the video. Don't trust your employer to use it for benefit though.

I literally work for what amounts to a media business, giving me a body cam would be like giving ice to an eskimo.

Body cams can already be had for cheap Electronics wise, they're not complicated or special. Yet, they're still not in widespread use beyond police.

The reason police body cams are pricey is because 1) "military/police grade" rip-off premium pricing and 2) The housing has to be designed to be waterproof, shockproof, dust proof etc because of what they do on a day to day.

A retail worker is not going to need this level of "proofing" because they're not running through an alley or something in their day to day