Because legally an employer can track anything you do at work (except for bathroom breaks), it is clear what the end result will be – total tracking. The only question is how long it will take to become commonplace.
The beginning is here already, workplaces that can tell whether you are at you desk or not. The primarily function is to save electricity by not having heating/cooling/lighting running unnecessarily. And in the same report, something that should be safe because the data is anonymised:
The Boston Consulting Group has outfitted about 100 volunteer employees in its new Manhattan office with badges that embed a microphone and a location sensor. Made by Humanyze in Boston, the badges track physical and verbal interactions. BCG says it intends to use the data to see how office design affects employee communication. [Bloomberg]
The obvious next step is for the data to not be anonymised.
So expect a future where everything you do at work is recorded (except bathroom breaks, but they can deduced of course). And then AI will decide who is or isn’t a good employee without needing to quantify their decisions.
And then, collectives of private premises will share their data. Your workplace will know how often you go to the gym, and what you ate at a restaurant. The only safe places will be in public (depending on your local government) and your home (depending on you).
