Boeing Busted By Employee Over Plans To Surveil Workers, Quickly Reverses Course

Boeing has paused its efforts to install and use employee-monitoring sensors, including at its office in Everett, Washington, after media inquiries followed an employee's leak of the plans. 

An unnamed Boeing employee at Everett, a key manufacturing site for the aerospace giant's jumbojets, shared an internal PowerPoint presentation with The Seattle Times touting the benefits of the tracking technology.

The plan reportedly called for installation of "workplace occupancy sensors" throughout Boeing's office that include motion sensors and cameras mounted in ceiling tiles, intended to monitor building occupancy.

"As we shared with some employees last month, we were starting a pilot program using a system for managing energy and space usage in selected office areas," spokespeople for Boeing confirmed to The Register. "The system, used by other companies, analyzes motion data and environmental conditions and does not identify people or documents."

"We have paused our pilot program at all locations and will keep employees updated," the aerospace goliath acknowledged.

According to the leaked presentation, the system was at least deployed at Boeing's St Louis, Missouri offices in October, and work began on it in Everett on Monday. The planemaker declined to clarify exactly where and how the occupancy tracking technology had been rolled out before the pause.

Privacy concerns loom large

According to the newspaper's reading of the PowerPoint slides, the surveillance system, made by Avuity, is designed to gather information on office occupancy and usage of various spaces. The presentation tries to assuage employee fears about the workplace monitoring by noting the cameras used by the system only take blurry photos that don't identify individuals or the writing on documents, though that may not be sufficient to satisfy concerns. 

As we reported recently, workplace surveillance is quickly becoming the norm in offices around the world as businesses continue to push remote workers to return to the office - Boeing among them. There's a certain degree of reasonability to the presence of those systems, especially as post-pandemic work shifts have in many cases led to companies deciding to shrink their real-estate footprints. Boeing itself sold off a considerable amount of warehouse and office space in Everett in the wake of the pandemic, and may be looking to justify more offloading of space.

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That said, installing systems to visually track employees, with or without blurring, may not be the best approach, and Boeing's immediate course reversal on being questioned about the practice makes it seem like the jet builder knows that. 

"Employees should not accept any kind of indoor location tracking as long as there are no reliable safeguards that prevent employers from misusing the data for problematic purposes," Wolfie Christl, author of a report published last month about workplace surveillance, told The Register for an earlier story. "In Germany and Austria, an employer would need to negotiate the introduction of such a system with employees, who would have a right to audit how the employer uses the data." 

When it comes to worker's rights, the US and EU aren't exactly on the same page, though, which Christl said needs to change. 

"The US urgently needs appropriate laws that protect employees from disproportionate surveillance in the workplace," Christl said.

Failing that, we'll just have to rely on more employees speaking up, which isn't necessarily a reliable strategy: the 737 Max manufacturer told its employees what it was doing, but not every company is likely to be as forthright, especially after this latest Boeing blowup. ®