There was an article a while back about how cell service providers were selling extremely granular location data, and some of the programmers working on those systems immediately showed up on HN to comment on their moral dilemma. I suspect it's not an isolated case. |
After an agent had been terminated, their punishment points would decay over time until such a time they reached zero (or another configurable threshold depending on how desperate the company was for warm bodies), at which time they would be sent an e-mail to their personal e-mail (which was collected during the application process), inviting them to “re-apply”. Being an early telephony company we also would send them a robo-call with the “good news”. This process was known as a “life-cycle” and it was common in certain labor markets for employees to have many such lifecycles. Another way employees could stave off automated termination was to work for unpaid overtime, which offered to reduce their point values per unit of overtime worked. Everything was tracked to second granularity thanks to deep integration with phone switches and the adoption of the open source Asterisk CTI.
This orwellian automation terrorized the poor employees who worked there for years, long after I left, before it was finally shut down by court order. I had designed it as a plug-in architecture and when it was shut down there were many additional features, orders, and punishment_types.