Thank you and welcome to this talk. My name is Joanna, and I'm Kilian, as you already heard,

and we're very happy to have you here and see that you're interested in this topic, which for us is very important, privacy in the workplace. And we want to tell you today the story of our research project that we started working at the Center for Internal Human Rights in 2015.

The center, the CIHR, is a research center at the European University of Adriena. It's in Frankfurt-Oder on the Polish-German border, an hour away from Berlin. And our research that we're going to present today is still going on, but we wanted to show you how it evolved so you can also become involved and share your experiences with us.

And the reason we are interested in workplace surveillance is because it's a very concrete form of surveillance that is very close to people and everybody has a story to share about. And what we're going to do in this talk is first talk about the legal and ethical challenges of workplace surveillance.

Then we're going to quickly draft out what is actually new here, what is the new level that we see in workplace surveillance today, give a very precise example for workplace surveillance in the platform economy, and then talk about why we think it's still very important to think about privacy in the workplace,

even though privacy seems a little lost. And then we will conclude with some thoughts on how this world might drag on what we see in the future. So when we started working on this project, our central question was a legal one. Can your boss spy at work?

So we were interested in the legal aspects of privacy and actually the story began 10 years ago with Bogdan. Bogdan Barbulesk was an engineer at an IT company in Bucharest. This is not Bogdan, of course, but just another guy with a funny mustache.

But this is more or less what workplace looked like in 2007. And it was actually Friday the 13th of July 2007 when Bogdan was told by his boss that he had been spying on him and he had been reading his MSN messenger chats.

Then the boss showed him a 45 page transcript of these chats. Now Bogdan was actually chatting with his fiance and his brother about some very, very private stuff, about health and sex life problems. So obviously he was not happy about it and a couple of weeks later he lost his jobs

because the boss had a final proof that Bogdan was using his company computer for personal purposes. Obviously Bogdan felt that it was unfair, especially because he had no idea that the boss had the capacity and the ability to do that.

So he went to court. So was it legal for Bogdan's boss to look at the contents of his chats? Well the short answer is we don't know. Last year we looked with our colleague Johan Stevens at the legal aspects of this case and we found out that actually it's still not clear for Bogdan and for millions of workers around Europe.

First the Romanian courts ruled in this case that actually the boss of Bogdan was right. So he took the case to Strasbourg, to the European court, invoking Article 8 and the right to respect of private and family life, home and correspondence.

But the initial ruling of the ECHR was actually not in favor of Bogdan. Basically the court said that the company's interest in this case in profit and productivity were worth more than the protection of the right to privacy of that individual.

Fortunately, for all of us, Bogdan appealed that ruling and we are still waiting for what the grand chamber of the court is going to say. But think about it. This case started 10 years ago. A whole decade has passed.

The entire workplace has gone through tremendous transformation. MSN messenger disappeared and now our favorite way to waste time at work is Facebook. And the technology moves super fast and law is moving incredibly slow and we still don't know if the boss was off limits in this case.

It does seem straightforward that the boss should have notified Bogdan that he will monitor his chats and it also seems pretty clear that there are certain very, very private aspects of life like health and sex life that should be extra protected and that's actually the case in general data protection regulation

which will be implemented in the European Union next year. But the rest we still don't know and we have to wait for the final ruling. So with this technology of workplace surveillance developing so quickly, surveillance is so cheap and easy to use and almost ubiquitous,

we cannot wait for the law to catch up. We need to also ask ourselves what are the ethical standards, basically whether it's right or wrong for the boss to look at the contents, to spy at us at work. So how do we define what is off limits? I always think that it's really good to look at the cases

that actually shock us the most, the cases where we find that the surveillance was intrusive or unjustified. For example, we're disturbed by the idea of a CCTV camera in a bathroom but we finally find it quite normal that we have to click our ID

every time we walk to the workplace. In similar vein, we might think that it's fair for the boss to process data about our working hours but maybe we don't want the boss to monitor our health. What makes it even more complicated is the notion of what is right and wrong

often depends on culture. So we actually wanted to look at the differences, the cultural differences between Germany and Poland where we're from but also the differences, for example, between Europe and Asia and specifically the Philippines where a lot of call centers are located. But another thing is company culture.

When you sign a job contract, you often agree to a certain level of surveillance that's inherent in that particular job. There are companies where you have to leave your private phone at the reception, companies where it's not allowed to use Facebook at work and there are other companies where the use of Facebook is welcome or even that's simply part of your job.

Another thing that's really changing is that this paradigm in which we leave our privacy when we walk through the door of the workplace and then we get it back when we go home is changing by the fact that there is more and more mobile working. So you might be working from a café

or you might be even working from your bedroom. So the lines between work and private lives are blurring and we might even feel that the feelings of privacy and intimacy are harder and harder to get. So the bottom line here is that we need to better define

both legally and socially what is off limits for us and for different workers in these new digitized environments. Not only legally but socially and culturally. And we think that a good starting point is to listen to workers as opposed to what disturbs or shocks them because this might be an indication that something is actually changing.

But first let's take a step back here and ask what is actually new about this. Because that's a fair question and it always comes up because workplace surveillance is an inherent part of work and it was always there. You cannot imagine a modern workplace

without having somebody monitoring and controlling what you do. To be very fundamental, that goes back to the division of labor basically. So as soon as we started separating a line of production into the very small parts, we invented managers and the only job of managers is to monitor and control

what other people are doing. And then you have the workplace surveillance already inherently built in. And this is something that workers accept or at least have to accept. And it's also to some extent in their interest.

Also to be able to prove that they work well and for the company to be making money, most workers agree that it's good to have some kind of control. And then what would come first to your mind when you think what is new here is that we have new digital tools.

And we already have super invasive tools like CCTV cameras, drug tests. In some jobs you have to pass a polygraph test to get, for example, when you want to get security clearance for when you work for the government on a high level position.

So many workplaces today are fully digital and every keystroke, every movement you make leaves a trace and can be monitored. And some surveillance products even make regular screenshots of people's screens in the office, count mouse clicks per minute or capture webcam images.

And all these kinds of software exist and is out there. But what is even more new or what is the new phase that we're now looking into with our project where we have an even more invasive or a new quality of workplace surveillance basically

is not only the tools that are changing but the entire model of management. There's a changing relationship between boss and workers and more people are nowadays working in fully automated work environments that entail the new form of actually management. Surveillance has become a new form of management.

And to make that more clear, more precise we want to take the example of the platform economy and later on the very specific example of Deliveroo food delivery. So if you work on a platform everything you do is monitored and tracked.

Think of companies like Airbnb or Helpling or Amazon Mechanical Turk, TaskRabbit and so on. Uber for example, what is it? Self-employed drivers in their private cars getting directions about where to go only via the app. Or Deliveroo, same concept. Self-employed riders on their own bikes getting directions about where to pick up and drop off the food

only via the app. Or take Amazon Mechanical Turk. The self-employed contractors sitting in their living room most likely get assignments and feedback about what they do only via the platform software that is used. So the point is

platforms provide you a fully algorithmic work environment and to some significant extent the algorithm here becomes the boss. And that is not a side effect but an inherent and fundamental principle of the business model. If your workplace is an app full collection of data about workers

becomes invisible and unavoidable at the same time. And this means that the software takes on classical management functions. So think of the worker being the little ball that is kept in balance and nudged in the right direction by the platform.

And scholars even came up with a term for this it's called algorithmic management. Where software algorithms assume managerial functions and shape the work environment all together.

And all the platforms have certain algorithmic controls built in such as for example rating functions where you have the famous five star rating. So not even the employer side gets to control the workers but also the customer side much much more because you can click and you can give a five or a one star for whatever the writer just did.

And that is not to say that is not humans building these platform softwares of course. So when I say this is management by the algorithm of course the algorithm was conceived and built by some humans beforehand. But in the daily work environment

the programmers don't interfere anymore so then it's really just the platform or the algorithm managing the workers. So conceptually speaking we have a new mode of managing workers.

We used to have traditionally as a dichotomy between hierarchy and a market. Hierarchy you have a clear line of demand think of a government bureaucracy from top down that's how workers are managed. And the other side is the market where you have a price for labor and you have contractors and the price is the coordinating factor.

And now we want to argue and that's in line with other scholars out there this algorithmic management is a new form and kind of a hybrid model that is maybe not in between but just a new concept to grasp if you're talking about the platform economy here.

So this was a rather theoretical description of why this is new and now Joanna's going to give you some more examples about make this a little more precise this algorithmic management by looking at the case of Deliveroo. Yes, so in order to see how this works

I started talking to Deliveroo writers in Germany and in the UK and I conducted first interviews and it turns out to be a fascinating case study of what privacy and autonomy mean in these automated work environments. So just to give you an idea

bike couriers or messengers or riders as the Deliveroo writers, at least here in Berlin like to call themselves are people who like autonomy. They're often young, well educated very mobile and flexible and they like this business model because they can choose their own working hours and it's an okay job as long as it pays well.

Many actually choose to be self-employed and often become a son of entrepreneurs on bikes. And theoretically the app makes their work easier. They don't have to talk to a boss they simply log into the app and wait for the order to come up. And the first thing I learned with this project is that it doesn't really make sense

to talk to them about privacy and the privacy in the app. They know that the app doesn't have access to any personal or intimate info. It just tracks their location and how they get from point A to B and how fast they were. So riders will say things like they're not going to do anything wrong with this information

or they say Google already knows that. And the personal data that is collected about them they can get in forms of stats especially they're evaluated based on how fast they ride they can be fired for bad stats

sometimes the stats are made available to them so they compare themselves against other workers that's the gamification element of this job. But they actually care more about the other type of data not the personal data but the aggregated and anonymized data. So these companies

the platform companies are collecting a massive amount of data to optimize to cut costs and also potentially to train artificial intelligence so these riders can be once replaced by robots or drones. And the workers also want to see these stats the same way that the company sees the stats.

Why? Because they want to know where it gets busy which times of the week are the busiest ones which areas of the city will be busier so they can optimize better their working hours. So when you think about it what they actually want is

as every worker they want stability predictability and decent pay but they also want to have the feeling of control which comes with having access to that information and they feel particularly out of control and particularly upset when the algorithm keeps changing so there are these tiny shifts tiny tweaks to the algorithm

that can have huge impact on their working conditions and or their pay. Just to give you an example recently one of the apps changed the system from picking couple hour shifts to one hour shifts so you can only sign up to work an hour then you have to wait for an hour and then you can work again or something like that

so this can have a huge impact on your daily life. So the question is really not does your boss spy on you at work it's rather how much control over your everyday life do you really have. And the last thing that I would like to share from these interviews is that maybe they don't want to worry so much

about the privacy of the app but they certainly understand that there is a need for private space for them to meet and a private space for them to communicate. Of course this is very important especially when they want to organize this is a very difficult type of work a lot of people are migrant self-employed

they don't have very good working conditions and also the company keeps over hiring to keep the workers competing against each other. So when they want to break that pattern and organize and pressure for better working conditions they need that space in the park or in cafe

and they also need that space in the digital sense as in they will not communicate organize this protest over company's chat but they will probably use some kind of encrypted service. So it seems that even at this very digitized workplace this privacy is not dead it's just that the meaning of it is evolving.

And now that we looked at this very specific example of the platform economy let's look at why we think that talking about privacy in that regard in some way Joanna said it seems like privacy is lost, right? But we think it's still very important to think about privacy in the workplace

or even more so. First of all because surveillance at the workplace is a testing ground for surveillance in other spheres of life and other fields. So it's not to be overly dystopian but you can see that historically that surveillance techniques have first always emerged in these kind of work environments

and it's not by coincidence that one of the biggest most prominent scholars of surveillance theory Michel Foucault he looked also at how surveillance worked in factories and in prisons but also in factories to see what surveillance is and how it works and what it does to people.

But here in the platform economy we have an even more intensified situation where we have at least three levels of deep asymmetry that make talking about privacy even more important. First you have the classical economic imbalance

between the employer or the platform with a lot of capital, a lot of resources and the workers that have less resources. Second of all the legal imbalance where nobody seems to be willing to hire people. Back in the day you had employers that were also willing to take on some responsibility for the people that employ

that make the actual money for them. On the platform that's not the case anymore so you have the liability really shifted to the weakest member of the production chain here. And then third is the information imbalance Joanna already talked about that that one side has access to a massive amount of data

that is collected on the platform and the other side does not. And that also creates a huge asymmetry in information. And then lastly but most importantly actually privacy is a basis for other rights most importantly other labor rights.

And that's the same concept that you always have throughout society you need privacy in order to enact or enable and enjoy other fundamental rights. And in the workplace most important is the freedom of association that is in the workplace the freedom to form unions. So for example in Germany where you usually have co-decision making bodies

in large companies employers are not allowed to monitor the entrance of the work council with a camera because that could deter people from going there. So you would have a chilling effect on labor rights if there is too much surveillance of this specific work council.

So we need to make sure that even at work there is enough privacy for people to exercise other human rights and just telling people well you have a choice you can work for this company or for that one that's not really helping much and that's not an option either because especially in the platform economy

people don't have that choice and they are much more stuck with a certain platform than they are before because their reputation is bound to the platform. So that's why we think privacy is still very important but we also see that privacy doesn't mean a lot to people

as a concept. It's an important legal concept but it's not necessarily a concept that is very telling that workers can relate to. So we are also thinking about other ideas other terms that might resonate better with workers

for example autonomy and control so that's something that you can feel more in your daily life do I have autonomy here or do I? Who's in control? Is it me or the other? And look at specific cases of discrimination because that's also something that everybody can share a story about how you were discriminated

and then the step to privacy comes after that. So we want to close up with the question of what next what should we do about this? Well obviously as researchers we think that more scrutiny of this topic is needed and we always like to think that we should look

both at the technology and the legal norms as well as the social norms. So in terms of law you can obviously see that it's important to monitor the changes that are happening in the European Court of Human Rights or the General Data Protection Regulation and it's also very worthwhile to look at the tech so study the devices, how they actually work

study the software, the new software used for management in particular and then finally study the algorithms and how the algorithms, whether they're fair whether they're not discriminatory at work. And as Kilian said it's also important to look at how the norms change

maybe not only privacy but other norms are salient here like autonomy, control or fairness. But what do we do as workers? Well, we can smash the device and we know of cases where people did that or delete the app but that's not a long-term solution for sure.

So how do you resist when your boss is an algorithm? You can of course try to ask unions for help and this privacy in the workplace has often been an important case of the collective bargaining process.

But there are many places where platform economies work but unions are not present and because either they're not able to or they don't want to or it's in countries where unions are just not strong enough and we can think of other creative methods to use collective action. And actually when you think about it

going on strike when your boss is an app has never been easier. You simply don't log in. And this is exactly what happened in the case of deliver writers in London. One day they got this notification saying that you're no longer going to be paid per hour you're now going to be paid per delivery and if you agree click here

if you don't agree don't log in. So they just quickly started communicating and they decided not to log in and this was a form of strike that actually did hurt the platform and the restaurants that collaborated with Deliveroo and ended up working. So when you think about it

the digitization and digital workplace also gives you new tools to mobilize and fight for your rights. But of course finally as citizens we also have to pressure our governments to pay more attention to this issue because these laws that are supposed to protect us are no longer adequate and we have to find other maybe more quicker ways

like guidelines or regulations or ethical standards that these companies should follow so our rights are still protected. The bottom line and what I take out most from this project that is still going on is that if we want a workplace, digital or not

that feels right for a human to be in it and that serves human needs not only technology itself or profit we need a private space at work a private space where we can maybe simply relax for a while and be together with other workers but also a private place where we can organize where things are going wrong

like that digital version of that work council room where there is no CCTV camera workers need also maybe exactly these private communication channels where they know that the boss is not listening. So we hope that this research will keep going and evolving

and will contribute to make the workplace virtual not more humane where human feels right and we would like you to maybe share with us your opinions or maybe private experiences from workplace that would help us develop this project.

Yes, we don't have time for questions because it's only half an hour slot but if you feel like sharing something email us or just come talk to us. Thank you. Thank you very much Joanna and Kyuya for pointing out those critical issues.

I got them in mine for sure.