I've always assumed that everything associated with a workplace was under surveillance. I'm not sure why anybody would be surprised or upset about security cameras. A bizarrely lukewarm take from the NYT here.
Bizarre that we would be regulating where people spend a significant fraction of their time? That's only a "bizarrely lukewarm take" in the US, few other places have this everything goes mentality.
Spending a significant fraction of our lives at work is also ironic: in a free, democratic country like the U.S., you're in an autocratic micro-regime most of the time¹.
¹ Granted, that you're free to replace with another or try to start your own!
Surveillance cameras in an office are fundamentally no different than having a manager's office that overlooks the factory floor. But maybe that's exactly it: journalists who work in an office are used to thinking of themselves as being of a fundamentally higher social class than factory workers.
"Surveillance cameras in an office are fundamentally no different than having a manager's office that overlooks the factory floor."
The difference is that the manager can't see everywhere at once.
I'm reminded of the famous office scene from Terry Gilliam's Brazil: [1]
and also of the Panopticon[2], which was just a Romantic fantasy of Jeremy Bentham's when he dreamed it up in the 1790's, but which has become reality in the 20th and 21st centuries, with the advent of supermax prisons, schools, factories, and offices, with their omnipresent surveillance.
Bentham described the panopticon as "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind". It's depressing and frightening that there are still many advocates of such oppression.
The article implies that the cameras were installed against terrorists. Some people are pretty happy to throw their privacy away in this illusory fight against terrorism. Needless to say, the terrorists have already won, we’re slowly giving up everything that separates us from them.
They have security cameras to protect people and the bank assets - not do monitor the work of their employees.
At least in Europe that's the law. Besides that, you must have visible warning signs to let people know there are cameras recording them, and you also have to notify the national entity that's responsible for data protection that you will have "X" cameras (image, audio, or both) for the "Y" purpose.
- For security reasons: to protect people and assets;
- For monitoring: to control your employees activity.
Picking a ridiculous example: if your boss tells you that you're spending too much time talking/doing a task/eating, because he as been watching you via security cameras, he will be in a lot of trouble.
