A Wal-Mart employee who worked in the company's security division was fired for recording phone conversations between a Wal-Mart employee and a New York Times reporter and for intercepting employee pager messages. Bruce Gabbard, a veteran employee who worked as a security technician for Wal-Mart, says the company regularly surveilled its employees, shareholders and critics. He says he was acting within the parameters of his job orders and that his activities were approved by Kenneth H. Senser, a senior vice president and former CIA operative who has headed Wal-Mart's global security operations since 2003. Gabbard says that Wal-Mart, like HP, was intent on finding the source of leaked company documents and information.
Wal-Mart told the Wall Street Journal this week that "it is our corporate responsibility to have systems in place, including software systems, to monitor threats to our network, intellectual property and our people," but said Gabbard went too far and violated company policy in recording conversations. The company also fired Gabbard's supervisor and said the two had not received orders or permission to record phone conversations.
But the Journal has uncovered some contradictions in Wal-Mart statements. The company says the recording of the New York Times reporter and others occurred over 4 to 5 months, but the Journal says it has information that the surveillance lasted more than a year and half and that other sources confirm parts of what Gabbard alleges.
Gabbard told the Wall Street Journal he was part of a large, sophisticated surveillance operation by the Threat Research and Analysis Group, a unit of Wal-Mart's Information Systems Division.
. . .
Gabbard told the newspaper that Wal-Mart sent an employee to infiltrate an anti-Wal-Mart group to learn if it was going to protest at the annual shareholders' meeting and investigated McKinsey & Co. employees it believed leaked a memo about Wal-Mart's health care plans. It also uses software programs to read e-mails sent by workers using private e-mail accounts, he said.
Who needs privacy? Apparently not the iPod generation who have grown used to airing their entire lives online and would feel unplugged and out of touch if internet eyes weren't watching them. Case in point -- Justin.tv. Both the San Francisco Chronicle and The Age, in Australia, feature articles today about Justin Kan, a guy who walks around San Francisco all day with a camera strapped to his head broadcasting his life to a growing fanbase who try to influence what he does. (As I write this, at 10:20 on Friday morning, I'm watching Justin and his roommate discussing a blind date the previous night -- when the audio frustratingly cuts out.) It's the Truman Show, replete with product placement and sponsorships, but with full cooperation from the show's star. From the Chronicle piece:
Viewers seem to delight in playing along with their new online idol, cramming chat rooms and pulling pranks on him, first calling 911 to report a stabbing in the group's apartment (prompting some friends to give Kan a bullet-proof vest for the next time officers burst in, guns drawn), then reporting a fire there. San Francisco emergency dispatchers, leery of any more false alarms, now call to confirm there's an actual emergency before responding. So fans moved on to different sorts of pranks, such as ordering $63 worth of pizza to be delivered to Justin.tv's door.
. . .
To get an idea of what Justin.tv is all about right now, picture four guys gone wild in a two-bedroom apartment littered with disheveled furniture, empty beer cans, remnants of pizza crust and randomly strewn socks and shoes. On a giant white board is the show's apparent goal: Jay Leno, 30 days or less. . . .
. . .
When some of Vogt's friends from MIT show up, they can't believe the show is for real. So Kan tells viewers that if they send 100 e-mails in 20 minutes, the entire gang will dive into the swimming pool completely clothed. Kan clocks 300 messages.
With that kind of response, Kan says he has no intention of turning off the camera anytime soon. "We will keep going as long as it's fun and as long as it's relevant," he said. "I figure that will be for a long time to come. ..."
Justin.tv isn't a novel idea, of course. But, unlike the early internet age of the Jennicam when the idea of watching a woman in her room still felt like seedy voyeurism, YouTube and widespread broadband connectivity have made it seem prudish for people not to broadcast their life to strangers and for the rest of us not to watch when they do.
Andrew Keen, author of the upcoming book The Cult of the Amateur thinks this kind of digital narcissism offers a media fix to people who are bored with their lives and have come to count on the internet to entertain them 24 hours a day. The slogan of Justin.tv is "waste your life watching other people waste theirs."
Keen thinks the sorry fad won't last and that people will move on quickly once the net becomes saturated with Justin Kans and internet users go in search of their next media fix.
"This is the last gasp of the Web 2.0 boom," Keen told the Chronicle. "People are going to look back at this and say, 'This makes Second Life look like the BBC.' I think even Justin will look back on it and be embarrassed."
But Emily Nussbaum of New York magazine would probably say that Keen has stumbled into the generation gap and can't see that the future belongs to the uninhibited. In her great article about the unprivacy generation, she quotes Clay Shirky of New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program.
"Whenever young people are allowed to indulge in something old people are not allowed to, it makes us bitter. What did we have? The mall and the parking lot of the 7-Eleven? It sucked to grow up when we did! And we're mad about it now." People are always eager to believe that their behavior is a matter of morality, not chronology, Shirky argues. "You didn't behave like that because nobody gave you the option."
None of this is to suggest that older people aren't online, of course; they are, in huge numbers. It's just that it doesn't come naturally to them. "It is a constant surprise to those of us over a certain age, let's say 30, that large parts of our life can end up online," says Shirky. "But that's not a behavior anyone under 30 has had to unlearn." Despite his expertise, Shirky himself can feel the gulf growing between himself and his students, even in the past five years. "It used to be that we were all in this together. But now my job is not to demystify, but to get the students to see that it's strange or unusual at all. Because they're soaking in it."
Clive Thompson has a great article in the March issue of Wired magazine about the new trend toward company transparency.
The See-Through Ceo
argues that nudity (in terms of corporate and political shenanigans) is
the new black -- meaning it's actually good for your company's bottom
line and reputation to strip down and expose all your mistakes and
shortcomings. Because if you don't do it first, somebody else will do
it for you. And you'll look worse for the wear when they do. From the
article:
Transparency is a judo move.
Your customers are going to poke around in your business anyway, and
your workers are going to blab about internal info - so why not make it
work for you by turning everyone into a partner in the process and
inviting them to do so
Thompson argues that in the Google world, you can't hide anything for long. So better not try.
Some examples of those who've been burned by the net: Diebold, Microsoft, Eli Lilly, Jobster.com.
"Online is where reputations are
made now," says Leslie Gaines Ross, chief reputation strategist - yes,
that's her actual title - with the PR firm Weber Shandwick. She
regularly speaks to companies that realize a single Google search
determines more about how they're perceived than a multimillion-dollar
ad campaign. "It used to be that you'd look only at your reputation in
newspapers and broadcast media, positive and negative. But now the
blogosphere is equally powerful, and it has different rules. Public
relations used to be about having stuff taken down, and you can't do
that with the Internet.
The so-called Family Locator service aims to bring in revenue from a
location technology Sprint and its rivals are required by law to put
into cellphones so that safety workers can pinpoint the location of 911
emergency service callers.
Sprint's service shows data such as street addresses to which a
child is close and the estimated accuracy of the reading, which could
range from a radius of 2 yards around the child to a radius of hundreds
of yards.
It also notifies children via text message that their parents have checked up on their location.
Entertainment conglomerate Walt Disney Co., which is renting space on Sprint's network to sell services under its
own brand, said last week it plans go after the family market with
services including a location offering that is similar to Sprint's
service.