New week. New episode!

You can listen by pressing play on the button above or by becoming a member — it's free — and getting the full show transcript, including our interview with Dr. Karen Levy about her book "Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance" — below.

But before we get there ... Something big happened this week that we didn't cover in the show. So I want to address it here.

Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden released a statement, which you can read here, about potentially one of the largest data breaches in American history.

The long and short of it is that a DOGE Bro claimed to his other bros that he had two databases of confidential information on an untold number of Americans, and that he would make that data available to his next employer.

We don't know what data specifically he stole, but we have a good idea, based on published reports, of what it could be. And what it could be are two highly restricted data sets.

So. Whenever stuff like this happens, people throw up their hands and say, "What can I do about it? Nothing, right? So what's the point."

Well, for starters, all because a maniac is burning down your house, doesn't mean you have to help them finish the job. In fact, you're morally and ethically obligated to stop them before they hurt themselves and anyone else.

But more importantly, there's plenty that you can do. Some of which we've already covered here at Stupid Sexy Privacy. (You can catch up on every episode of our show released so far over here.)

For example, if you listen to the show, you've heard us say that every single American should have their credit frozen until they need it.

YOUR KIDS INCLUDED. MAKE SURE YOU FREEZE THEIR CREDIT UNTIL THEY NEED IT.

You can do this for the whole family by calling the four major credit agencies: Experian, TransUnion, Equifax, and Innovis and asking for the freeze to be put on.

The next thing you want to do is get an Identity Protection Pin from the IRS. As the IRS explains, "An identity protection PIN (IP PIN) is a six-digit number that prevents someone else from filing a tax return using your Social Security number (SSN) or individual taxpayer identification number (ITIN)."

Next, if you get benefits from the Social Security Administration, now is a good time to move money out of any accounts known to SSA. Obviously, this is easier said than done, and a lot of people depend on their Social Security money each month.

So only start this process as soon as your payment for the month has cleared so that you don't mess up the next one.

As we've advocated for frequently on this show, the big banks suck. The Post Office should offer every American resident a basic savings and checking account. Since they don't yet, don't use big banks. Always move your money into a local credit union. They're not always perfect, but they are absolutely a step better than a company like Chase.

The odds are good your credit union also wasn't involved in Jeffrey Epstein's operations. So, there's that too.

You should then log into your SSA account and request a copy of your Benefits Statement.

This way you have evidence of what you have paid in and what you are supposed to get in retirement.

You also want to request a copy of your transcript from the IRS.

If you can't log into your Social Security account, and you still have a functional / opening SSA office near you, which is no guarantee these days, call or visit them and request a copy of your benefits statement.

Again, I know Musk and DOGE have made this process brutal, but if you need to go in person, there really aren't too many other alternatives short of getting your Congressman to assist you. That IS something you can do. Call (202) 224-3121 and ask to be connected to your Congressional representative, because they are supposed to be the ombudsman for you and any federal agencies and services. Tell them you are concerned about the recent DOGE data breach at the Social Security Administration, you want a full investigation into how safe your information is with SSA, who has it, and if anyone has accessed it, where it's been shared.

If you have any specific problems, like the SSA office being closed near you, and you can't access SSA online, but you want your benefits statement, this is something the Congressional representative and their office can help you with.

Don't put off doing this. There's so much we don't know about what Elon Musk did to the Social Security Administration, and it could be this is only the beginning of what's been leaked from there, not the end.

We'll do our best to monitor this story and share updates with you as we get them.

-BJ

Hello. Farewell. Hello. Farewell.

You can follow me here on Bluesky

Show Notes

Stupid Sexy Privacy Show Notes For Season 1, Episode 29

Episode Title: The Speed of Business Kills: Bossware Makes Truckers Drive Themselves to Death

Guests: Dr. Karen Levy, author of Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance

Episode Summary: This week on the show, BJ interviews Cornell University professor Karen Levy about her book, "Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance," and our host Rosie Tran covers tips you can use to limit your employer's ability to spy on you when you work from home.

Resources (NO Affiliate Links. This is what we use.)

Our Sponsor: DuckDuckGo <--Our Recommended Browser and VPN

Get Your Privacy Notebook: Get your Leuchtturm1917 notebook here.

-BitWarden.com (Password Manager: easier to use, costs money)

- KeepPassXC (Password Manager: free, harder to use, but more secure)

-Slnt Privacy Stickers for Phones and Laptops

-Slnt Faraday bag for your Stranger Danger phone.

-Mic-Lock Microphone Blockers

-Mic-Lock Camera Finder Pro

-BitDefender (best anti-virus for most people across most devices)

-Stop using SMS and WhatsApp, start using Signal.

-Use Element instead of Slack for group coordination

-Use StopGenAI's Guide to getting Generative AI out of your life.

--Use cash whenever possible. If you have to buy something online, try to use Privacy.com to shield your actual credit or debit card when making purchases online.

Get In Touch: You can contact us here

Want the full transcript for this week's episode?

Easy. All you gotta do is sign-up for our newsletter. If you do, you'll also get a .mp3 and .pdf of our new book, "How to Protect Yourself From Fascists & Weirdos" as soon as it's ready. It's free.

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Stupid Sexy Privacy Season 1, Episode 29

DuckDuckGo Commercial #3 (Game Show)

Announcer: Welcome back to the DuckDuckGo Privacy Challenge, where contestants get a chance to learn why millions use DuckDuckGo's free browser to search and browse online. Now for our first contestant, Julie. True or false? Google's Chrome protects your personal information from being tracked.

Julie: Hmm, I'm going to say ... true.

Announcer: Incorrect, Julie. If you use Google Search or their Chrome browser, your personal information has probably been exposed. Not just your searches, but things like your email, location, and even financial or medical information.

Julie: Wow, I had no idea.

Announcer: Second question. What browser can you switch to for better privacy protection?

Julie: Is it DuckDuckGo?

Announcer: That's correct. The DuckDuckGo browser keeps your personal information protected. Say goodbye to hackers, scammers, and the data-hungry companies. Download from DuckDuckGo.com or wherever you get your apps.

Stupid Sexy Privacy Intro

Rosie: Welcome to another edition of Stupid Sexy Privacy. 

Andrew: A podcast miniseries sponsored by our friends at DuckDuckGo. 

Rosie: I’m your host, Rosie Tran. 

You may have seen me on Rosie Tran Presents, which is now available on Amazon Prime.

Andrew: And I’m your co-producer, Andrew VanVoorhis. With us, as always, is Bonzo the Snow Monkey.

Bonzo: Monkey sound!

Rosie: I’m pretty sure that’s not what a Japanese Macaque sounds like.

Andrew: Oh it’s not. Not even close.

Rosie: Let’s hope there aren’t any zooologists listening.

Bonzo: Monkey Sound!

Rosie: Ok. I’m ALSO pretty sure that’s not what a Snow Monkey sounds like.

*Clear hers throat*

Rosie: Over the course of this miniseries, we’re going to offer you short, actionable tips to protect your data, your privacy, and yourself from fascists and weirdos.

These tips were sourced by our fearless leader — he really hates when we call him that — BJ Mendelson. 

Episodes 1 through 33 were written a couple of years ago. 

But since a lot of that advice is still relevant, we thought it would be worth sharing again for those who missed it.

Andrew: And if you have heard these episodes before, you should know we’ve gone back and updated a bunch of them.

Even adding some brand new interviews and privacy tips along the way.

Rosie: That’s right. So before we get into today’s episode, make sure you visit StupidSexyPrivacy.com and subscribe to our newsletter.

Andrew: This way you can get updates on the show, and be the first to know when new episodes are released in 2026.

Rosie: And if you sign-up for the newsletter, you’ll also get a free pdf and mp3 copy of BJ and Amanda King’s new book, “How to Protect Yourself From Fascists & Weirdos.” All you have to do is visit StupidSexyPrivacy.com

Andrew: StupidSexyPrivacy.com

Rosie: That’s what I just said. StupidSexyPrivacy.com

Andrew: I know, but repetition is the key to success. You know what else is?

Rosie: What?

Bonzo: Another, different, monkey sound!

Rosie: I’m really glad this show isn’t on YouTube, because they’d pull it down like, immediately.

Andrew: I know. Google sucks.

Rosie: And on that note, let’s get to today’s privacy tip!

This Week's Privacy Tip

Every year, 120,000 people die because of lousy workplace management. According to the CDC, that means terrible bosses will kill more people this year than Alzheimer's, diabetes, or chronic lower respiratory infections. Now, to be clear, not all bosses are bad. Your boss may be terrific, but your friend's boss may not be. Or your sister's boss. Your sister's boss is probably a monster. One time, BJ had a boss who stormed into the office and screamed at her secretary, you b****. I'm gonna rip your face off.

That boss had to be escorted out by police, but wouldn't you know it, she got to keep her job. It's safe to say that boss has probably killed people and not just because she was a bad manager. But our point here is bad bosses kill. And so if you're working from home, you need to protect yourself from them, especially because providing software for bad bosses to spy on employees at home is now a multi-billion dollar business. So today we're going to talk to Professor Karen Levy, an associate professor in the Department of Information Science at Cornell University.

Karen is the author of Data Driven, a new book about workplace surveillance. Dr. Levy's book highlights the micromanagement and abuse of truck drivers by software, algorithms, and other bossware.

Now, you may not be a truck driver, but as Dr. Levy points out, what we see happening to the truck drivers will soon spread to every facet of the workplace. Currently, there isn't much we can do to stop bad bosses from spying on their employees at home, but there are a few things you can do to protect your privacy better.

For starters, if you apply all the lessons we've covered so far in this show, you'll be in better shape than most employees. So go back and listen to the previous episodes and apply those tactics, especially the ones involving using a VPN and covering up your webcam. If you're using equipment provided by your company to work from home, you absolutely want to make sure you cover up that camera. Disable your microphone, and use a VPN. We can't stress enough how important it is to not use your personal equipment when working from home.

Keeping everything separate not only protects your privacy, but also protects the security of the company from fascists and weirdos. This is because in most stories you hear about ransomware, that ransomware was installed either through an employee clicking on a shady looking link, or by visiting a site where the site then downloaded the ransomware without you realizing it. And I don't know if you realize this, but there's a war going on in Europe right now. According to the BBC, 74% of ransomware revenue went to Russian associated hackers. So if you want to help do your part to protect Ukraine, the simplest and easiest thing you can do is secure your workplace devices.

One last thing, because there are no regulations in the US right now concerning how, when, and where a boss can spy on you, most privacy researchers will tell you to get a new job if you don't like being spied on. That is terrible advice. And it also overlooks our friends and human resources. If you work for a company that employs some kind of bossware, you can talk to human resources about what the software does what information it collects, and how it will collect that information. You can also ask to opt out of that sort of tracking.

Your HR department may deny this request, but we think it's worth a discussion. This way you can focus on getting what you need done, without some psycho-threatening to rip your face off.

And just an FYI, this week's interview was previously recorded back in 2023.

Our Interview with Dr. Karen Levy

BJ Mendelson, co-producer of Stupid Sexy Privacy: Karen, thank you so much for joining us today. Would you be so kind as to tell us a little bit about yourself?

Dr. Karen Levy, Professor of Information Science at Cornell University: Sure, I'd be happy to. I'm really happy to join you. My name is Karen Levy. I'm a professor of information science at Cornell University. And I study the legal and ethical dimensions of data intensive technology. And you have a book coming up. you tell us a little bit about that?

Karen Levy: I do. I have a new book that came out just a few weeks ago. It's called Data Driven, Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance. And it's a book I've been working on for like 11 years, like a crazy amount of time.

BJ: Oh Wow.

Karen: Yeah, it's like a long standing it was my graduate dissertation, and I've been working on it for a long time. So I'm really excited. It's finally out. And it's looking at kind of the development of new surveillance technologies in trucking, and how that has changed what it means to be a truck driver and how truckers relate to other folks in the industry and answering other questions about kind of workplace surveillance and what it looks like today.

BJ: Yeah. I'd love to know how, how the book has changed and evolved. mean, if you've started about a decade ago, it's pre Trump pre COVID. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Karen: Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I started the book because I was really interested. So I was a lawyer before I went back to school to become a sociologist. And I was really interested in kind of rules and how they function and especially what happens when we start to use digital tools to enforce rules that maybe we weren't enforcing all that strictly before. And I found out sort of on like, just kind of on a fluke that something like this was happening in trucking. So what was happening was that around 2011, when I started working on the book, there was a conversation in Washington about whether or not truckers should be digitally monitored in terms of how much they drive each day. Like whether we ought to kind of track them digitally to kind of compel them to comply with the rules about how much they're allowed to drive every day and every week.

And so I really interested in that. And it was like a kind of a live conversation at the time, like it was being actively debated. So I started to study it. That rule eventually did become like that became the rule. So in 2017 regulations passed and required that all truckers be digitally tracked. So it's been interesting to kind of see, you know, to get a sense of the industry before that was required and then what it's looked like after that. But then, as you mentioned, right, like lots of other things have happened during that time. So one kind of part of the book that I added later has to do with autonomy, right? Like around 2016, 2017, I would start to tell people like, 'oh yeah, I study truckers and technology.' And they would say like, 'oh yeah, of course, self-driving trucks', right? Like that became kind of part of the conversation more recently. So a lot of the book is kind of looking at like that discussion and how autonomous vehicles might influence what it means to be a trucker or whether there will be human truckers at all.

BJ: Yeah. I mean, so it sounds like the that the surveillance came from a good place initially, right? Like it came from the truckers are not taking care of themselves and following the rules, but it hasn't worked out that way.

Karen: It hasn't worked out that way! (Laughs) Maybe it's so shocking. So yeah, like a lot of the rhetoric, as you point out around surveillance of truckers has to do with safety, right? Like, and we all, we all like safety, right? Nobody really wants to die in an accident on the highway. Like nobody wants that, including truckers. So there was a lot of conversation about how we need this because, we don't want truckers ... Truckers are kind of quite famously fatigued. Like they drive too much. They're well known for kind of fudging the rules about how much they're allowed to drive each day. And a lot of it has to do with how they're paid. So truckers are paid by the mile that they drive. So that just creates a natural incentive that you like drive as much as you can because like you only get paid when you're moving. Right. And so it's like been pretty well known for a long time in the industry that in order to make a living, which truckers barely do, you just kind of have to drive as much as you can. And you would, you know, pledge the rules where you needed to. And so as you point out, right, like maybe it's not beyond the pale to think like, well, 'if that's the problem, we should create, we should better police that right?' Or maybe we should, you know, better try to control this rule breaking that had been really rampant in the industry. The problem with that approach is that like, and I ... in the book, I talk about this as a problem with kind of the actual order versus the apparent order of trucking. Right? Like if you conceptualize the problem as truckers break the rules and we don't want them to break the rules anymore, that's a fairly limited way of understanding what the problem actually was in trucking. So the issue wasn't that people were breaking the rules a lot because like it was fun to do or something. The issue was that like the way we've chosen to pay these essential workers really like leaves to like is undercompensated them for their labor. Like they're really exploited for their labor. Truckers today make about half of what they made in 1980. There's a whole long political economy of the industry. It means that truckers basically work in sweatshops. If you look at how little they're paid and how much risk they face for the really essential work that they do. And so when you think about the problem that way, that suggests that digital surveillance is solving the wrong problem. The issue should be, let's not just police harder, but let's actually solve some of these root problems in the industry and pay people for their actual labor. And then maybe they wouldn't be incentivized to drive themselves to death.

BJ: I know people listen to circuit wonder why, why we're talking about truckers. I want to ask if you could just emphasize how important they are to just the function of this country ...

Karen: Yeah. Oh, I'd love, I'd love to talk about that. So yes, I truckeres ... we like to talk a lot about essential workers in this country, right? The people that make the economy function or that like help us get the goods that we need. Truckers are about as essential as it gets, right? So truckers have a little thing. If you got it, a truck brought it. Like if you look around your house or like the clothes you're wearing or anything that's in your bag or whatever, there's like a very high likelihood that everything you have was at some point on a truck being driven by a trucker. Like they just touch pretty much everything. And you know, in the digital age, I think their jobs have become in some ways even more important because now we really want to know like we want our deliveries quickly and we want to know exactly when they're coming. And so like that involves a lot more tracking of a job that historically like was pretty immune to a lot of the workplace surveillance dynamics that a lot of drivers, or excuse me, that a lot of workers, especially blue collar workers, have faced for a long time.

So if you ask truckers like, why do you want to be at? 'Why did you get into trucking?' A lot of them will say specifically because I didn't want someone looking over my shoulder all the time, you know, I wanted to do my work in the way that I saw fit and in a way that, you know, like I wanted to conduct myself based on like my own human autonomy and decision making power. And that has really changed. That's really changed in the industry owing to all these digital surveillance apparatus that has built up over the last several years.

But yeah, like you said, they're just incredibly essential. There's about 2 million long haul truckers in the US. And like many types of infrastructure, we don't think about them very much. Or if we do think about them, it's negative. We're like, well, we don't want a truck stop in our neighborhood, or we don't want trucks on our local roads.

But I don't know if that really does justice to like how much we need them, right? Like how essential they are to the way the economy runs.

BJ: Yeah. And so how did, how did COVID impact if at all, it just the surveillance of the truckers.

Karen: Yeah. So COVID is an interesting, it's interesting, right? Because ... So one thing that happens often in the context of like national emergencies, is that like, so truckers are subject to all of these rules about how much they can drive every day and every week, right? Like we cap the number of hours they can drive for safety reasons. It's without getting into it in a bunch of detail, roughly like they can work 14 hours a day and 70 hours a week, which is still a lot, right? But those are like basically what the limits are. And oftentimes in context of emergencies like COVID, we suspend those rules and this happens a lot, right? Like if there's a tornado and like people really need fresh water or something or right in COVID like people didn't have toilet paper, right? Like we really needed stuff to move. And so what will often happen is that those rules are suspended temporarily, in order to allow truckers to just move goods more quickly. And interestingly, one of the things that happened is that like nothing really happened. Like nothing bad really happened when we suspended those rules. I mean, granted, everything was a little bit different. And maybe there were a few other cars on the road. So it's not exactly like a perfect, you know, natural experiment. But it does sort of suggest that when you give people a little bit of decision making power about how to conduct themselves safely, Like maybe that's enough, right? Maybe you don't need like these very strict rules and those very kind of overweening surveillance capability. Maybe people can actually just make safe and healthy decisions themselves. So COVID was sort of like maybe a little kind of proof, temporary proof that maybe things would be okay if we like trusted people a little bit more to do their work.

Advertisement For Our Upcoming Book

Hey everyone, this is Amanda King, one of the co-hosts of Stupid Sexy Privacy.

These days, I spend most of my time talking to businesses and clients about search engine optimization.  

But  that's not what this is about. 

I wanted to tell you a little bit about a book I've co-authored with BJ Mendelson called How to Protect Yourself from Fascists and Weirdos.  And the title tells you pretty much everything you would want to know about what's in the book.  

And thanks to our friends at DuckDuckGo,  we'll actually be able to give you this book for free  in 2026.

All you need to do  is go to the website stupidsexyprivacy.com  and sign up to our newsletter.  

Again, that website is stupidsexyprivacy.com and then put your name in the box and sign up for our newsletter.  We'll let you know when the  book  and the  audiobook is ready.

If you want a PDF  copy that's DRM free,  it's yours. And if you want  an MP3 of the new audiobook, also DRM free, you could get that too. 

Now, I gotta get outta here before Bonzo corners me because he doesn't think that SEO is real and I don't have the patience to argue with him. I got a book to finish.

Interview Continued ...

BJ: Right. Yeah. And so that was the next thing I wanted to ask you was what comes of all this data? are we really, are they seeing the quote unquote productivity gains that the employers are expecting to see? Like it seems like they're measuring something, but not measuring the big picture when it comes to employees?

Karen: Yeah, it's a really good question. there's a couple interesting ways to answer that question, I think. The first is just the basic question. We deployed this technology extensively to make the road safer. Has that happened? And the answer is no. So actually, if you look at crash rates and fatality rates, they've gone up in trucking since one of the fatality rate, I think, hit a 30-year high the year after this electronic logging mandate took effect. So like they're not doing what they claim to do. And in the book, I go into a bunch of detail about why I think that's happening.

And then the other question is like, well, what are they doing? Like, what effects are they having? And you allude to this kind of question about productivity and workplace surveillance. So one interesting thing that's happened is, you know, the government said, all truckers have to install these devices are called ELDs, electronic logging devices, the government says everybody has to install these. But what that has actually meant is that it's like a nice opening for trucking firms like for managers to say like, 'oh, you now that our trucks have these devices, like, let's also collect a bunch of data about truckers productivity,' right? In very much the ways that I think we're seeing in lots of different industries where a lot more workers are kind of measured in lots of different ways that they that are pretty new, right? Like there, there was a really great New York Times article a few months ago that maybe some of your listeners saw about how like a hospice chaplain like now gets a score based on how many visits she makes. Maybe you saw this piece, right? Like that it's coming for lots of different, lots of different professions and lots of different industries. And definitely in trucking, it's really changing what it means to be a trucker. Like now, you know, a manager or a dispatcher will give a trucker a scorecard, you know, scoring them on things like how much fuel they use, for example, or how hard they break or how fast they go. And these systems are then compatible with like lots of other systems like camera systems that are ... face the driver at all times and maybe have AI that detects if the driver's eyelids are closing too frequently, right? In which case it'll sound an alarm and let the manager know things like that, or wearable devices that track like a trucker's heart rate or brainwaves. So those things weren't required by the government, but because the government required like some, some surveillance technology, it becomes really easy to like scaffold on a bunch of other kind of workplace management stuff.

And then in addition to that, there are other kinds of third parties getting into the game, right? So now that there's all this data about these millions of trucks, insurers are really interested in that data or third party companies that want to sell parking spots to come to truckers are interested in that data. So there's a lot of people finding a lot of value in this data. The one party that's not finding that much value in it is the trucker himself.

BJ: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I love to ask a little bit about like, so what, because this is a great example of the use and misuse of data and how it impacts us without necessarily thinking about it. So are truckers seeing like their auto insurance rates increase based on their specific behaviors?

Karen: Yeah, so I haven't actually found data suggesting that the rates have gone up or not. What has happened, or at least what had happened in the period that I was looking at it, is that trucking companies were getting discounts just for sharing the data. And I think this is kind of similar to what has happened in passenger regular vehicle auto insurance, right? Like at first you get like a 30% discount or something just for plugging in the device that then tells Progressive or whoever, where you're going and how you're driving, right? So like that's sometimes called a plugin discount. So something like that is happening. Companies that are big, right? Like the major players, the big top 10 companies, of course, are able to get discounts based just on scale.

Parties that are not obviously benefiting as much from that are the owner-operators or the small businesses. About 80% of the trucking companies in the United States, or I think it might be 90%, I'd have to go check the number. Some very large number are just like mom and pop shops, or like me and my brother or something like that. And those companies don't get the same analytic value from this data. And it's harder for them to just stomach the extra costs that is associated with installing the technology.

BJ: Have the truckers pushed back at all on this? Because in doing the research for this interview, I've been looking into some of the pushback against companies spying on their employees, for lack of a better description, and some of the privacy laws that that might run afoul of. Is there any pushback on the trucker part?

Karen: There is. And it's really interesting. One of my favorite chapters of the book to research and write was a chapter on resistance. Like, what are the things that truckers do to kind of push back against this monitoring Because of course, they're very motivated to do that, right? Like this is really hits at the heart of a very strong occupational identity, right? People who work in trucking are truckers, right? Like that is really a core aspect of who they feel like they are, how they kind of derive self-worth from a job that's really difficult and dirty. You know, it's like one of those paradigmatic dirty jobs. And so a lot of times, people kind of compensate for poor labor conditions or poor pay by through sort of like the occupational identity that becomes associated with doing that work. And so obviously this surveillance technology really hits at the heart of who they feel they are. They do all kinds of things to kind of push back. Sometimes it's as overt as like smashing the devices, right? So I talked to like several drivers who are like, yeah, I just took a hammer to it, right? Like they just communicated what they thought by just smashing the thing, right? Which is like obviously not Super sustainable and it's your job, right? But it does like send a pretty strong message. There are lots of different other strategies they use too. There's some kind of more collective strategies where like every trucker who works in a company will kind of like some of that was one story truckers told me about how they all decided to smash the device on the same day. Or they'll exchange information about kind of how to block the data collection temporarily. They'll do things like cover up cameras with like a popsicle stick or a piece of tape or you know, put a piece of tin foil on a receiver, things like that.

One of the things that was really interesting to me and which surprised me is actually that, you know, we tend to think of resistance as this like bottom up strategy, right? And a lot of these strategies where they were truckers like doing things to try to thwart data collection by their employers, or by the government.

But also, like a dynamic I was surprised to see is that companies also often told truckers exactly how to avoid detection in cheating. Because the companies kind of want it both ways. Like the companies want to collect this data, but they also ultimately sometimes want the workers sometimes want the truckers to break the law because they want the goods to move at the speed of business. And so what that sometimes means is that companies, I like to watch dispatchers tell truckers, you know, one way that you can get a couple extra miles in, even though your time is elapsed is by driving at like a very like slow rate of speed, like 10 miles an hour down the shoulder.

The device won't detect you doing that, but that way you can get the last few miles to your pickup point. Right? And those were things that truckers were explicitly instructed to do. So that really surprised me, right. And kind of made more complex. of the questions that I think we asked sometimes about what resistance looks like and what it's for.

BJ: Yeah. No, it seems like it's, it's almost a like gorilla tactics, right?

Karen: Yeah. Yeah.

BJ: Is there, is there anything on the legislative front or on the union front that's being done to better protect them?

Karen: Yeah, it's a great question. So I mean, in terms of unionization and trucking, the unionization rate and trucking is really low, like low single digits. So you know, the Teamsters used to be a very powerful trucking union, but their power has really diminished over the last 30 or 40 years. So, you know, there are some efforts by groups like the owner operator, Independent Drivers Association, which is not a union, but like an interest group for, for small trucking companies to push back against some of these things.

But those strategies are a little bit limited just because there really is very little unionization and trucking. There are some moves in Washington that I'm really excited to see happening. The most exciting of them, I think, is a piece of legislation that's been introduced that would... So truckers currently are exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act. This is the law that gives people overtime pay and lots of other protections that most workers are entitled to truckers are explicitly exempted from that. There's like a specific clause that says if you work in transportation industries, you don't get those protections. And I think actually addressing that problem, like that's a really obvious reason why truckers end up working themselves to death, right? It's because they're just uncompensated for a lot of the labor that they do. They're not able to make a living unless they put their bodies on the line and like, you know, break the law pretty flagrantly. And the electronic logging, you know, surveillance system really doesn't solve any of those problems, right? It doesn't attempt to solve those root problems.

So I am excited about the prospect of maybe entitling truckers to overtime pay and getting them the compensation that they deserve for like this essential work. I think doing that would really solve a lot of the problems that the surveillance is like sort of a duct tape solution for, right? It's like, you know, and this is often the case, I think with digital technology, we deploy it when we like don't want to solve the underlying problem or there isn't political will to solve the underlying problem. We're like, we'll just slap some surveillance on it and keep people from breaking the rules.

But a more effective thing to do is to actually like look at why they're breaking the rules and figure out if we can change kind of those deeper, deeper issues in the industry.

BJ: I'd love to ask you what, if someone is listening to us and they work from home and they're concerned about the same kind of monitoring that might be done. What is something that they can take away from the truckers experience that they could benefit from?

Karen: Yeah, I think, you know, in many ways truckers are like a unique group of workers in many ways, right, there are things that are special about trucking, but also, I think the dynamics that they're beginning to deal with are really like pretty ... that there's sort of a canary in the coal mine for a lot of other kinds of workers. And maybe especially folks who work from home, right, it's become much more common, because it's just much easier for managers to try to supervise the things that workers are doing in all kinds of different industries and professions, right? Including both, you know, blue collar work, like working in a factory or in a warehouse, as well as more professionalized work, right, like in finance or in law or medicine. You know, you can read about ... there are studies of workers dealing with this really in every, you know, conceivable place. And I think folks who work from home are dealing with it more and more because increasingly, these surveillance capabilities are built into a lot of office tools that we all use every day, right? Like Microsoft Office has these features or, you know, maybe your manager knows how many Slack messages you're sending.

And so this creates, you know, important questions about how much privacy we're affording to workers. We know that workers do better work when they're afforded a little zone of privacy, right? They're more productive, they're more creative. If they don't feel like they're being watched all the time, right? I think any of us could probably, you know, think about how effectively we do our work if we felt like we were being constantly evaluated.

We also know that oftentimes these tools don't measure the thing that's like most important or most distinctive about our work, right? So it's pretty easy for a manager to measure like how many emails you send. But like many of us would say, I think most of us would admit that the days we're sending a lot of emails are maybe not our most productive days in terms of like, making a meaningful contribution to the enterprise or something. So there are always these measurement questions, as well as questions about, the stress levels that workers feel when they're under a lot of ... when they're kind of under the eye of managers. And so I think a real question going forward is, you know, just because you can, like, does that mean that you should supervise all this stuff about what workers are doing?

I think there are also really important questions around kind of what the appropriate boundary is. So as more people work from home, as we all have experienced, that means like more insight into our family lives, right? Or into like the faces of our dogs and our children, things like that. You know, that boundary between work and home has really blurred in a lot of important ways. And the same thing is happening in other contexts too, right? The questions about like, is it appropriate for your manager to keep an eye on your social media or to look at your LinkedIn and know when you're updating it? Which is a thing that some employers do because, you know, it kind of gives them a clue that you might be looking to leave the firm or something. Right? So those types of questions around boundaries, I think are becoming really crucial for workers across like across the spectrum.

BJ: Yeah. I think for just taking the employers point of view for a second, you know, I think a lot about Frederick Winslow Taylor basically lying and fudging the numbers of that quote unquote famous experiment. So, like what would you tell employers about measurements? Cause it seems like we tend to focus on one thing and not the whole picture when it comes to employers and employees and all the state of gatherings is not helpful.

Karen: Yeah, totally. No, I love the way you put that. I mean, you're right that it is there is like a deep irony in the fact that like the original management consultant like Speedy Taylor basically just made it up as he went along. And I think, you know, I think that's really actually endemic to a lot of these cases, right? It's very, very difficult to come up with a meaningful proxy for productivity that you can really readily measure without also pissing people off so much that they're not going to want to do it for you anymore. Like people are pretty reactive in that way. And there's lots of empirical studies across lots of different, different industries showing that like, you know, if what you want is creative workers who are committed to the workplace, the thing you should do is either a consider just not monitoring stuff so closely because you know, like you, mean, most of us would put our say, like it's pretty easy to put yourself in those shoes, right? Would you want someone looking at every keystroke that you're pressing or every email that you're typing or like every eye movement that you have, like very few people want to live under those conditions.

BJ: It sounds, I mean, I always get frustrated when I ask this question because I know so much of it is legislative. But what is it that people listening to this who might work remotely some days, like what is it that they can do like the truckers to maybe better protect themselves and from that monitoring?

Karen: Yeah, it's a really good question. I mean, and I think you're right in the way you framed it, right?

I'm always hesitant to be like, well, the power is in your head, like this is your problem now. And so the thing you should do is buy like a mouse wiggler that will fool your boss, right? Which is like one approach people sometimes take and understandably so, right? Is they kind of push back in these, these ways that, you know, can be effective or can help people at least feel as though they have some autonomy in a situation that's pretty deeply imbalanced in terms of power.

But I also agree with you that what's really needed is, you know, is legislative change. And we're starting to see some interesting, I think for the first time since I've been paying attention ... there are some interesting moves in Washington, DC saying like, you know what, like, this is not appropriate. We should allow workers the freedom from spying bosses.

The other thing I think that workers can sometimes do in some types of workplaces, ... it's been interesting to kind of study an industry where there's lots and lots of different employers and to see that employers implement these things in very different ways, right. So just because the technology is the same doesn't mean it's always rolled out the same way. There are some employers, I think, who are really conscious of ... deploying these tools in ways that are, you know, where they talk to their workers about why they want to do it, or they get workers viewpoints on like, what's an appropriate line to collect data on and what's not.

You know, I talked to trucking companies that were really explicit about like, you know, there are certain types of data that we can collect, but we just don't because we want it's more important to us to have workers that stay with us for a long time. And, you know, giving them that zone of privacy is really essential. So, you know, that's not always going to be feasible unionized workplaces. Obviously, this can be something that is discussed in the collective bargaining process, you know, but other workplaces, too. I think if workers or excuse me, if employers have kind of a take a long term view, they'll often find that it's not in their interest to really kind of like hyper monitor their employees because they want that longevity, right? Or because there's more value to them in having folks who are actually interested in doing high quality work for a long period of time. So, I think there are moves that can be made both on the national level, on the individual level and on the firm level.

BJ: So my last question for you is sort of, it's a typical journalist question. 'where is it all going?' which drives me nuts. But if you, if you were to write a sequel to your book, what are some of the things that you would expect to encounter?

Karen: In trucking or just in like workplace surveillance?

BJ: in terms of trucking. The truckers being surveilled?

Karen: Yeah. So I mean, I like, this is a depressing answer to a depressing question, but I think honestly more of the same, right? So one of the things that I expected to find, like when I started to look into questions around worker replacement, right? So there were all these questions about like, you know, are there even going to be truckers in 10 years? Like human truckers, because maybe we won't need them, because we'll just have autonomous vehicles. And then we'll have a different problem, which is unemployment, right? But like, these workplace surveillance problems, maybe they'll just go away because we won't have these workers. And like that, I think is really short sighted. And I spent a bunch of time in the book talking about why, you know, in both the trucker context and in other contexts of workplace automation, it's really unrealistic to assume that like we won't need human workers anymore. Like that's almost never the case. The technology is not there. There's a bunch of reasons for it.

So but what that actually ends up looking like is like, it's not that autonomy substitutes for surveillance. It's that actually surveillance and autonomy end up sort of complementing one another. So what you see, like if you look at the way AI is used in trucking right now, which is this is kind of like the next wave, I think for a lot of industries is using AI in these processes. What AI looks like in trucking right now is stuff like, you know, some of the wearables I mentioned, right? Like we're to use AI to detect, you know, if your head is nodding too much, because then we think that means you're tired and then we'll like shock you. Like I was reading, I write about one in technology that like delivers a small electric shock to workers when they're getting too tired, right? It just seems really humane or, you know, "we will detect your your brain will do a constant EEG on your brainwaves to see if there's like signs of disruption, right, like, sensibly out of a desire for safety," but also in this like really intrusive, almost like cyborg-iation kind of way. So I think that sort of cyborg ization of labor is like, something we've begun to see in different industries, and which is really coming to the fore in trucking, which is this idea that like people will increasingly work alongside machines.

And what that ends up looking like for a lot of people is that they sort of become part of the machine themselves, right? Or we monitor them in such a way that they have to effectively operate as like a cog in the machine. And that just entails even more and more invasive surveillance of their bodies and the things that they're doing.

BJ: Yeah. Those, uh, those national privacy laws can't come fast enough.

Karen: My fingers are crossed. Although even those have limitations, right?

BJ: Yes.

Karen: So yeah, yeah, we need a lot of different kinds of change.

BJ: This was terrific. I really appreciate you taking the time.

Duck Duck Go Live Read: VPNs

Rosie: You know, it used to be we would recommend you use a Virtual Private Network, or VPN, only for specific circumstances. 

Like say, if you’re out in public, and you’re using an unfamiliar Wi-Fi network. That’s a great reason to use a VPN.

But these days, we feel a VPN has gone from a nice to have to a must have.

For example, let’s say there’s a fascist out there with a lot of power. 

And that power could be used to force your Internet Service Provider to turn over information about you. 

Like say your download history. 

Or all the websites you visit.

Our goal at Stupid Sexy Privacy is to teach you how to protect yourself from fascists and weirdos.

So, these days, we feel everyone should be using a VPN.

The thing is, the VPN space is really scammy. 

Some of the loudest advertisers have the worst track record when it comes to protecting your data.

That means you could lose money on a company promising you protection, and offering you none. 

Everyone is in a different situation when it comes to protecting their privacy and their anonymity. 

But. 

For most people, in most cases, what they need is a simple VPN solution that just works. 

And they should be able to trust the company providing that service.

That brings us to our friends at DuckDuckGo.

As part of their subscription plan, DuckDuckGo offers a VPN built for speed, security, and simplicity.

It installs right into the DuckDuckGo Browser, and you don’t need to download anything extra.

And unlike a lot of VPN companies out there, DuckDuckGo doesn’t log or store any data that can connect you to your online activity.

You can sign up for the DuckDuckGo subscription via the Settings menu in the DuckDuckGo browser, available on iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows.

Or via the DuckDuckGo subscription website: duckduckgo.com/subscriptions. 

The DuckDuckGo subscription is currently available to residents of the U.S., U.K., E.U., and Canada. Feature availability may vary by region. So, make sure you check the website for further information.

Stupid Sexy Privacy Outro

Rosie: This episode of Stupid Sexy Privacy was recorded in Hollywood, California.

It was written by BJ Mendelson, produced by Andrew VanVoorhis, and hosted by me, Rosie Tran.

And of course, our program is sponsored by our friends at DuckDuckGo.

If you enjoy the show, I hope you’ll take a moment to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you may be listening.

This won’t take more than two minutes of your time, and leaving us a review will help other people find us.

We have a crazy goal of helping five percent of Americans get 1% better at protecting themselves from Fascists and Weirdos.

Your reviews can help us reach that goal, since leaving one makes our show easier to find.

So, please take a moment to leave us a review, and I’ll see you right back here next Thursday at midnight. 

After you watch Rosie Tran Presents on Amazon Prime, right?