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May 2, 2023 39 tweets 14 min read Read on X
NEW: "Surveillance and Algorithmic Control in the Call Center", a case study on contact center software and automated management.

It explores technologies that are used to monitor, rate, rank and micromanage workers in call centers and similar workplaces:
crackedlabs.org/en/data-work/p… ImageImage
This case study is part of a larger project led by Cracked Labs, which examines and maps how companies use personal data on (and against) workers in Europe, together with @algorithmwatch, @JeremiasPrassl, @UNI_Europa and others, funded by @Arbeiterkammer:
crackedlabs.org/en/data-work
The work environment pioneered in the call center, which involves extensive monitoring and performance control, has spread into many areas, from helpdesk services to debt collection to remote nursing, from outsourced back-office work to content moderation to 'AI' data labeling.
The case study makes two contributions:

- It summarizes research on how call centers actually use monitoring and algorithmic control, with a focus on Europe

- It examines software that is available on the market, based on an analysis of technical documentation and other sources
The investigation focuses on contact center systems provided by the leading vendor Genesys, whose software is used to manage and monitor 720,000 workers, according to the company. It also documents data practices from other firms like NICE, Verint, Amazon, Cogito and Callminer. Image
I went through several thousand pages of software documentation. The findings show that today’s contact center systems offer a wide range of mechanisms to structure, direct, monitor and control work down to the second.

1) Performance metrics, targets and rankings are ubiquitous. Image
Dashboards, reports and alerts help to identify “outliers” and appoint coaching sessions.

This is how the Genesys system can show real-time performance metrics like the 'average handling time' directly to workers, putting them in relation to defined targets (green, yellow, red). Image
Other performance control mechanisms that exploit peer pressure to intensify work include 'wallboards', which show metrics to the whole team in the office.

Here's an example wallboard from a Slovakian firm that displays individual-level metrics and can be 'plugged' into Genesys. Image
Genesys also offers a system that obligates workers to collect “points” throughout the day by hitting targets and behaving as desired, and to compete with others, turning the call center into a Black Mirror episode.

Genesys on its website: “competition is a natural motivator” Image
NICE, another leading contact center software vendor, which originally sold surveillance tech to the military sector, offers a system to 'automate incentive compensation', i.e. performance-based pay.

Workers see how hitting/missing performance targets will affect their salary. Image
2) The concept of the “queue” creates a virtual assembly line with the constant need for immediate action.

Genesys provides many mechanisms to automatically prioritize and assign interactions (calls, emails, chats etc) and other tasks (e.g. loan application handling) to workers.
Automated call and task allocation can be used to maximize efficiency and minimize the workers' idle time.

Managers can define key performance indicators that determine how quickly calls and other tasks are assigned to workers based on their skill profiles and past behavior.
Notifications and timers can act as virtual whips.

e.g. Genesys provides call centers with a timer shown to workers that counts down the available seconds for 'after-call work'. If they don't finish on time, the system may set their 'status' to 'not ready' and raise an alert.
Workers may have to get in line with rigid scripts and other workflow automation mechanisms that tell them what to say, what to look up and what to enter into forms in different stages of a call.

Or they have to step in when IVR systems, voicebots and chatbots demand it.
3) Genesys allows call centers to fully monitor and record calls, other communication contents and screen activities - in the name of training, quality assurance, customer satisfaction and compliance.

Managing “quality” and customer satisfaction may turn into behavioral control. Image
Genesys' software can automatically analyze and assess, second by second, what call center workers say, which phrases they use and whether they are associated with a "positive" or "negative" sentiment.

Added together resulting in a sentiment score for each call or conversation. Image
Supervisors or quality managers may assess call center agents and their work on an ongoing basis.

They single out calls and other 'interactions' and evaluate them, which may include listening to calls or rely on sentiment scores, and can then result in 'agent quality' scores. Image
As detailed in section 2.3 in the case study, Genesys presents a wild mix of promises and purposes with respect to communication monitoring and analysis #purposelimitation

Genesys also emphasizes that supervisors can listen to a workers’s calls without the worker being aware. Image
Genesys also provides software that combines training with skills assessment and performance control.

The 'Performance DNA' module helps call centers to rate and score workers for their 'friendliness', 'tone of voice' and 'call metrics' based on online tests and monitoring data. Image
Other vendors provide even more intrusive stuff.

Cogito, a system that can be plugged into Genesys software, claims to measure 'emotional state' in a call, communicates the detected emotions to workers in real-time and instructs them on how to change their speaking style. Image
Cogito claims that its scores are 'objective' measures 🙄

And it states that, as it would not be easy to “make an emotional connection with customers ... on demand”, it aims to help call center agents improve empathy in an automated way by “implementing empathy at scale” 🙄
Callminer, another speech analytics firm, also promises to extract information about emotions and behaviors from calls, and to calculate “objective” scores that assess, for example, “effort”, “emotion” and “customer satisfaction”. It also instructs agents to e.g. "show empathy". Image
Callminer can be plugged into Genesys.

Its early investors include the CIA's venture capital firm In-Q-Tel, which stated that it has "tapped Callminer's expertise" to "serve in the United States national security interest".

Call center monitoring technology is often dual-use. Image
This is also true for Verint, which provides contact center tech including speech analytics, performance monitoring and scheduling. Also, Verint has supplied phone surveillance tech to the NSA, as reported in 2013.

(in 2021, Verint spun off its defense business into a new firm) Image
Yet other vendors sell invasive surveillance technologies targeted specifically at those who work from home.

Trendzact uses webcams for worker monitoring and automatically flags behavioral anomalies (left). The UK company Asterlogic records keyboard and mouse activity (right). Image
Both systems can be plugged into Genesys, i.e. installed via the company's "app store".

In a Sept 2020 blog, Genesys promoted Trendzact's workspace monitoring system as a "nontraditional employee monitoring tool" for tracking both “productivity and compliance of at-home agents”. Image
4) In addition to software that micromanages calls and other tasks down to the level of the phrases mentioned in conversations, Genesys offers functionality for 'workforce planning' and automated shift scheduling - to get the maximum out of a minimum number of flexible workers.
Genesys can automatically schedule shifts, breaks and assignments to particular work activities throughout the day (e.g. responding to calls, working on task queues).

While the system can be configured to create "regular, fixed" schedules, it appears to focus on flexible shifts.
The system can automatically distribute breaks and meals across the working day based on predefined constraints. If the algorithm cannot schedule certain breaks or meals, it may skip them, “relax" the constraints or generate a warning.

Call centers can turn off these warnings. Image
Automated "intraday reschedules" may change start and end times for shifts, meals, breaks and work activities.

Genesys states it may not be "practical to re-optimize the current hour" because changes to meals and breaks “might be difficult to communicate to the affected agents”. Image
Generally, schedules are generated in a way that “closely matches requirements with as few paid hours as possible", according to Genesys, which also suggests that “unneeded agents can be sent home if you are overstaffed, or extra agents can be called in if you are understaffed”. Image
Scheduling is based on "forecasting" mechanisms.

Genesys can predict future workload in relation to desired KPI objectives and based on historical data on work activities. These forecasts can directly affect performance targets, work intensity and schedule stability for agents.
If e.g. the forecasted interaction volume is too high, the call center could either hire additional agents, reduce the 'handle time' target to speed up the virtual assembly line or increase the 'agent occupancy' metric to minimize any remaining 'idle' time between calls or tasks. Image
Genesys emphasizes that "overstaffing" could cost "hundreds of thousands to millions" and promises to help call centers to "develop highly efficient just-in-time hiring" so they "know precisely when, where and how many agents to hire—and when to offer unpaid leave or overtime". Image
Genesys’ scheduling system can reward higher-rated workers with the ability to choose more desirable shifts or vacation days.

Its shift trading system can, to the extent agents feel a mutual responsibility to take shifts, be considered a mechanism that exploits peer control. ImageImage
Genesys and the other examined vendors were selected as illustrative examples of wider practices.

While the 'customer success stories' on the Genesys site suggest that many of these functionalities are in use in Europe, the details of how employers deploy them remains unclear.
The findings demonstrate that the design of these systems can shape how they are used by employers and thus how they affect the daily lives of workers.

Default settings and recommendations laid out in the software documentation can also have an impact on how employers use them.
While a legal assessment of the examined data practices is beyond the scope of this case study, data protection issues are briefly discussed in section 5.6.

The study's findings will be incorporated in the main report of the ongoing project, which will draw further conclusions.
Section 8 in my case study summarizes surveys and field reports on the actual use of monitoring and algorithmic control in call centers, with a focus on Europe. It also addresses how workers are affected + the complementary role of low wages, short-term contracts and outsourcing. ImageImage

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More from @WolfieChristl

May 30
So, Microsoft exploits activity data from Outlook, Teams, Word etc across customers for its own promotional purposes, including on meetings, file usage and the seconds until emails are read.

Aggregate analysis but based on massive personal data processing
microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/…

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Microsoft states that the analysis on the seconds until emails were read excludes EU data. Activity data from Outlook, Teams, Word etc, however, seems to include EU data.

What's their legal basis? This is also personal data on employees. And, are business customers fine with it?
Should cloud-based software vendors exploit personal data on users of their services, including private persons and employees of business customers, how they see fit?

I don't think so.

Not even for public-interest research, at least not without academic process and IRB review.
Read 4 tweets
Feb 29
Some more findings from our investigation of LiveRamp's ID graph system (), which maintains identity records about entire populations in many countries, including name, address, email and phone, and aims to link these records with all kinds of digital IDs:crackedlabs.org/en/identity-su…
Identity data might seem boring, but if a company knows all kinds of identifying info about everyone, from home address to email to device IDs, it is in a powerful position to recognize persons and link profile data scattered across many databases, and this is what LiveRamp does.
LiveRamp aims to provide clients with the ability to recognize a person who left some digital trace in one context as the same person who later left some trace elsewhere.

It has built a sophisticated system to do this, no matter how comprehensive it can recognize the person.
Read 12 tweets
Nov 14, 2023
As part of our new report on RTB as a security threat and previously unreported, we reveal 'Patternz', a private mass surveillance system that harvests digital advertising data on behalf of 'national security agencies'.

5 billion user profiles, data from 87 adtech firms. Thread: Image
'Patternz' in the report by @johnnyryan and me published today:


Patternz is operated by a company based in Israel and/or Singapore. I came across it some time ago, received internal docs. Two docs are available online.

Some more details in this thread. iccl.ie/wp-content/upl…
Image
Here's how Patternz can be used to track and profile individuals, their location history, home address, interests, information about 'people nearby', 'co-workers' and even 'family members', according to information available online:

isasecurity.org/patternz
web.archive.org/web/2021062210…
Image
Read 30 tweets
Nov 6, 2023
, a 'social risk intelligence platform' that provides digital profiles about named individuals regarding financial strain, food insecurity, housing instability etc for healthcare purposes.

Incredibly intrusive, horrifying that this can exist in the US. sociallydetermined.com
Image
"It calculates risk scores for each risk domain for each person", according to the promotional video, and offers "clarity and granularity for the entire US".

Not redlining, though. They color it green. Image
Making decisions based on these metrics about individuals and groups seems to be highly questionable and irresponsible bs.

Safegraph, a shady location data firm, is among the data providers:
safegraph.com/customers/soci…
Read 6 tweets
Oct 16, 2023
Bazze, a US data broker that purchases smartphone location data from mobile apps and advertising firms, and sells to the US Dept of Defense, according to the WSJ (), openly promotes a commercial location mass surveillance system for 'government customers'. wsj.com/tech/cybersecu…
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I extracted information about mobile location data they claim to sell per country from their website:


Japan: 920m records, 5.5m devices
Brazil: 370m records, 6.3m devices
Australia: 280m records, 1.7m devices

...and data on people in 200 other countries. bazze.io/cdi
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explains that it does not 'collect or sell data from individuals within the United States, Canada, and European Economic Area countries'.

So, global commercial location data except US/Canada/Europe, for national security (and finance, as a side business). bazze.io

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Read 19 tweets
Oct 13, 2023
New WSJ report found that 'Near', a consumer data broker based in India, Singapore and the US with an office in France, obtained massive location data via digital advertising firms like OpenX, Smaato and AdColony and sold it to US defense/intel agencies:
wsj.com/tech/cybersecu…
Image
Near's general counsel and chief privacy officer:

The US govt "gets our illegal EU data twice per day", a "massive illegal data dump".

"We sell geolocation data for which we do not have consent to do so", "we sell data outside the EU for which we do not have consent to do so" Image
If this isn't reason for EU data protection authorities to take urgent action than I don't know what is.
Read 18 tweets

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