If body cams get cheaper and cheaper, companies might start asking more people to wear them while working.
E.g.: https://coloradosun.com/2024/07/31/youth-corrections-audio-surveillance/
I could see this for doctors, at restaurants, stores,, etc… eventually.
Are you ready to wear one?
EDIT TO ADD: A few people said this wouldn’t ever make sense for doctors (privacy laws) or for fixed locations (stores). I should have thought of that.
But what about Uber / bus drivers, or repair people who go into homes? I can imagine a large corporation thinking a cam is a good idea, for their own CYA (not for the customers’ or the employees’).
Also I don’t like this idea either, to be clear. I was mostly playing devil’s advocate here to see what you all think. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Pretty much what I expected, tbh
Absolutely not. I like my current job, but if body cams became mandatory, I’d quit. I’d get ready to leave if they were ever even “tested” at another location.
Absolutely not, as that would mean my company violates my country’s privacy laws. In my field of work there is no valid reason for wearing a body cam.
That depends… who controls the footage?
If it’s my employer, absolutely not unless the job is high liability already because then it becomes a liability for me when somebody else controls my data.
If it’s just for me, sure I would wear it if it’s not too much trouble and I have concerns.
I would absolutely, categorically, stop doing business wherever I see employees wearing bodycams.
Same here. But imagine if you were living in The Fifth Element world of mega-corps. They tell you to wear a camera so they can tell when you’re not working…
There’s monitoring software like that already.
Oh, yes if you keep control over the video. Don’t trust your employer to use it for benefit though.
Certain jobs I would. fire, police
Most jobs I would not
Sure. But where to draw that line? I can imagine companies will want them for liability reasons.
The line I draw currently is this. Jobs that we currently look at and say those persons should have body cams. Police fire rescue.
I’d also add landlords and their staff/assistants should have them. Other than that . No I wouldn’t wear them.
I bought a dashcam for my vehicle, and choose to use it to protect myself from false accusations.
Body cams should be like dash cams, something used by employees to exonerate the person wearing them.
I’m not a LEO, and I can respect that maybe it’s not this simple… but I would expect “honest” cops to voluntarily wear one to protect themselves from false accusations of abuse of power.
But when it crosses over from protecting the employee to big brother watching over you that’s the line.
Body cams used to protect the wearer - Good Body cams used to punish the wearer - Bad
I imagine if my occupation includes carrying a gun, interacting with citizens, and a historically high rate of extrajudicial deaths amongst people I am supposed to be protecting. A publicly accessible camera would be beneficial to easing the minds of those I interact with and providing evidence for any actual instances where I felt my life was threatened.
Draw the line at jobs where someone wields authority over the public, disputes can’t be easily resolved after the fact, and the person doing the job moves around too much for fixed cameras to be adequate. I can’t off the top of my head think of an example that isn’t in law enforcement.
If you take away the authority part, you could say that, for example, cleaning personnel should wear body cameras because it’s so easy for them to commit theft, but they’re already treated pretty poorly and I wouldn’t want them humiliated further.
I heartily agree: they should be a tool to serve the public interest. That police can withhold that footage after an incident or have any justification having a camera off in public, I find it reprehensible.
Using it on private citizens feels more like having a cheap overseer…just a tool to punish.
I don’t give a shit what companies want; the only employees that can be legitimately forced to wear such things are those who have obligations to the public.
those who have obligations to the public.
I’m so glad I quit the library.
Absolutely not. You can justify it with whatever reasoning you want, but it would be used against employees far more than it helps employees.
Preach. It wasn’t body cams but our company gave us all mandatory phones with custom location tracking software on them. It was done as part of their pandemic response. The phones were supposedly only tracking your location within a mile of the site and were only used for enforcing social distancing and infection tracking. Well when the return to office mandates came around, upper management was suddenly too informed about how much time we spent onsite. They swore up and down it wasn’t the phones and went to pretty absurd lengths to find some other metric to prove it.
If I had to deal with that, the phone would be in a faraday box with a router that connected to a VPN that cycled servers every 24hrs.
Every day they would think I was in a different country.
There’s a reason why they’re my former employer. Upper management was discussing replacing our badges with the phone. We needed the phones to get into the building because that was where the covid protocol pass was kept and security checked. It was impressive how quickly they took advantage of the pandemic to make creepy breeches in privacy.
There are things that I do where a body cam would be useful, but I wouldn’t wear it for office work.
Everyone in the building wears one regardless.
My management or owners are not allowed to see the content and it can only be reviewed by a third party arbitration.
If the camera is off I might as well be dead to my employers and coworkers.
My pay increases proportionally to the success of the business.
Hell no, cops however should have less control over the cameras they wear.
A few of the supermarkets in my country have this as an option for staff. Since the pandemic there’s been an alarming rise in public attacking shop staff.
This. Yes. I would just find a new job, but what if all employers in an industry require body cams?
Why doctors? Filming patients would be a nightmare in terms of privacy and data policy.
In my line of work (psychotherapy) it would be equally impossible. People are having a hard enough time as it is opening up to medical professionals, I don’t think that the additional barrier of being actively filmed would help anyone.
Check out the linked article. I agree with you but that agency is only adding cameras for the agency’s benefit, not the worker’s.
Youth corrections staff is still a whole other story than doctors though. A physical examination is probably one of the most vulnerable positions one could be in. These cameras would record people getting naked, multiple orifices being examined, and patients talking about symptoms or things they are unsure and often ashamed about.
The cost would be enormous. I imagine many people would be even more reluctant to go to the doctor than they are now.
And the benefit, in my opinion, would be very slim. Medical malpractice is far more subtle than the examples from the article. As patients we’re rarely worried that our doctor will physically assault us, we’re worried about errors in judgement, delays in care, and prejudices based on gender, ethnicity, age, sexuality, and so on. And those aren’t directly observable most of the time. Even if you get the moment on camera where your doctor decides to trivialize your symptoms you mostly wouldn’t be able to prove it happened for discriminatory reasons.
Yeah I’m not a doctor but I work in healthcare. Would be a massive HIPAA violation (patient privacy laws).
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