I don’t know if there has been a more exciting week, since the week of August 21st, 1977! In one week, McDonald’s has reissued the McRib, and Mariah Carey has released a chocolate chip cookie line. It’s too much! Someone save me from myself.
Lots of suits this week in the tech world. Here’s another week of tech talk with Mark Starling and the First News 570 crew. This week, New York and a bunch of states want to sue Facebook, Amazon announces a new device to enforce employee compliance, and El Goog is sued for spying on employees then firing them. You can listen to Mark and I point and laugh while talking about the wild and crazy technology world every Thursday morning, LIVE at 6:43am Eastern.
AMAZON ANNOUNCES CORONA CORPORATE COMPLIANCE TATTLER
This week, Amazon announced Panorama, an electronic appliance that plugs into a company’s existing closed circuit TV system that enforces employee compliance. The system uses off-the-shelf AI technology to determine if employees are wearing face masks. Amazon is advertising that the system could be used to perform automated inspection tasks such as searching for product defects in manufacturing. Fender Guitar says it uses Panorama to track the amount of time it takes an employee to assemble a guitar. Potentially, there can be negative impacts to employee morale when monitoring tools are abused. My suggestion? Hire the right people. Meanwhile, Amazon IS paying its employees $500MM in bonuses.
EL GOOG ILLEGALLY FIRES WORKERS AFTER SPYING ON THEM
The National Labor Relations Board has filed two complaints against Google after learning they fired the employees after spying on their behaviors. The two employees, Laurence Berland and Kathryn Spiers, were fired after engaging in employee organizing and activism. Google, the former ‘Do No Evil’ corporation, have had employee relations issues these past two years. Employees have staged walkouts for Google’s work with DoD and allegations of sexual harassment. My wife has contracted for Google, and one of my colleagues told me she’d never work at the Googleplex again. Go figure.
PREVIEW: GROUP OF US STATES PLAN TO SUE FACEBOOK
Talk about telegraphing your intentions. A group of states, led by New York, are planning to sue Facebook on the grounds of antitrust violations. No one knows what is going to be listed in the suit, but it will be the second suit governments have brought against a large tech company for antitrust violations with Google being the first this year. The US Federal Trade Commission has had its sites on Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google since 2019 and Congress has interviewed the tech CEOs several times this year. Somewhere in a grove of trees in Washington state, Bill Gates is looking up from his book and thinking, “ha!”