My company built the smart helmet used to track Qatar’s army of abused workers. The claim is GPS and accelerometer where used to track if a worker stopped moving or fell due to an accident; the geo fencing was supposedly for tracking if they had enough workers in an area for the job.
The reality is the helmets where/are used as mass surveillance tech to ensure workers are continuously active and never leave their assigned areas for petty things like going to the bathroom or finding shade to prevent heat stroke.
This comment is now one of the top hits on Google for "Qatar slave helmet". And it's the only hit when I put quotes around the phrase to force an exact match.
If this is real you should get in touch with investigative journalists, e.g. ProPublica.
("Get in touch with investigative journalists" probably applies to a bunch of the people posting in this thread.)
Actually, I want to think more about the theory of change here. It's conceivable that a ProPublica article could actually make the situation worse, e.g. by advertising the existence of the helmet to other abusive employers, or causing abusive employers to rework their labor practices in a way that looks better to the press but is actually worse.
If the company that makes the helmet is based in a country with good government, maybe a reasonable regulation would be to score workers on productivity, but place limitations on the scoring somehow. E.g. the helmet stops showing the worker's location when they've spent too much time in the heat. Or the helmet estimates the fraction of the workday that the worker spent offsite, but all workers who spend 20% or less of their time offsite are given a score of 20%, so the employer can't force the worker to spend more than 80% of their time onsite. I don't think productivity scoring has to be dystopian in principle; generally speaking it seems reasonable to pay people according to how productive they are.
You could also argue for regulating the helmet out of existence, but I assume in that case it would just be built somewhere else with lax regulations. So the trick is to put in regulation that creates a humane experience for workers, but not so much that Qatar is incentivized to contract the development of a new, more draconian helmet in a different locale. I don't think this should be too hard, because creating a humane experience for workers should also help productivity to a degree.
There's also a security dimension here -- you don't want abusive employers to be able to circumvent these limitations. So you could make it so the helmet only runs code which has been signed with the company's private key, or have a lot of the functionality server-side.
OP i am investigative tech journalist. i would love to talk about this. my dms are open and my signal number is here: https://twitter.com/alibreland @hannon22
Amp up the sort of disdain that might, for example, prevent international organizations from granting legitimacy to these regimes. Things like FIFA, as a completely random example.
Sure, but FIFA cares about money and at least some people care about not giving their money to deeply unethical entities. That’s what it’s meant to accomplish.
oh man, that was rough. Your story reminded a group of people who should report here — The "Green QR code" app that Chinese government deploys in the name of COVID to track and surveillance people. I even saw a tiktok (douyin) video that showcase one of the developer, praising how young they are and how handsome they are. The comment section of the video is a different scene entirely.
But the same time, if they didn't develop it, someone else will. So it is hard to put the blame on them specifically.
To add something related someone I know worked for a firm that was tasked with identifying regime critics for a gulf state. It wasn't clear what they were going to do with the list until they started disappearing.
>Workers’ location and activity is identified within the boundaries of a project for the greater good of all involved within the project and to ensure every worker is safe especially when it comes to fall from height detection, ambient temperature extremes, and confined space crowd control, and more. We found that workers responded positively to the technology.
>Do you have proof that it works?
>WakeCap connected 15+ job sites with 2000+ workers per project...Predominately mega construction projects in Dubai and Saudi Arabia.
The website looks really slick, but seen in the light of this thread it's disturbingly dystopian. First step towards Cybermen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberman
"This won't stop you feeling pain, but it will stop you caring about it.".
Wow, 2 posts in and we may have a winner already! That’s really, really bad. I have a friend (well, not anymore) who worked for Palantir for a long time and was very proud of it, and I was gonna ask him if he regrets anything, but this is a whole other level.
Eh... Was it really that hard to guess what they're gonna do with it? How long ago was that? It's not like their abuse of [foreign] workers is anything new.
> How long ago was that? It's not like their abuse of [foreign] workers is anything new.
It's also not like it's common knowledge. Myself I only learned about it couple years ago, here on HN, because of some comment threads that segued into discussions about Qatar construction projects.
Point being, without knowing anything about OP, including where are they from, you can't assume they had a chance of knowing this before taking the job, or even learning about it on the job. The world is awash with news stories about everything - often you learn about a huge tragedy only when you chance on a story about it.
I expect it to be very common knowledge, but possibly it's only known in Europe, as we are much closer to the Middle East and the football angle is more relevant.
Someone shares an insightful story that others can learn from and your first thought is to shame them, and then without knowing the first thing about them or what else they've done with their life, you tell them the best way to atone for their sins?
This thread is such a great opportunity for learning and curiosity and yet you choose to see it only as an opportunity for moral grandstanding, possibly scaring away other people with interesting stories to tell. Why are you on this website?
> IMHO it'd be nice if you donated some of your earnings to a human rights focused NGO operating in the area.
Is there somehow a difference in impact depending on who does this? Maybe if you chipped in, the Qatar slave workers would be even better off. Or is this just about guilt-tripping strangers for their past? :-)
>Now they should try to make it right - donating money to people trying to fix the situation is a good way to do that.
You're assuming that this individual hasn't already done something to atone (which goes against HN's rule to assume best intentions). That, coupled with a tone that comes off as though you know better than this person, basically round out the definition of "condescending".
I am not assuming anything. I made a suggestion, nothing else. They're free to do nothing if they feel like they already did enough. You're assuming I'm assuming <...>, which goes against the HN rule to assume best intentions.
Donating money rarely fixes problems. What it does is create organizations that draw their lifeblood from the continued existence of the problem, and continued donations of money.
I don't see anything patronizing or showing superiority in what I wrote. I am saying this as a peer, not as a superior.
It's kinda weird to expect people not to make mistakes such as this if nobody tells them it's wrong. And it's normal for people to tell other people they do bad stuff if they do.
>I don't see anything patronizing or showing superiority in what I wrote. I am saying this as a peer, not as a superior.
And you have four different peers who have responded to you suggesting that you are being condescending. Take a step back and ask why - intention and tone are two different things, and if you get the latter wrong then we will misunderstand the former.
>It's kinda weird to expect people not to make mistakes such as this if nobody tells them it's wrong. And it's normal for people to tell other people they do bad stuff if they do.
Just let 'em be. You're not a hero. They admitted what they did, and why they know it's wrong. You're not doing anything other than going, "Yep, you sure did fuck up."
So you’re assuming that you know better than them what they’ve done wrong, that you have to tell them, and how they should make up for it. That’s how your tone is coming across.
Genuinely can't tell if you're joking or not but it doesn't matter. Either way this is basically a paraphrase of one of the most astute dril tweets of all time:
"drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,"
