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Amazon announces new employee tracking tech, and customers are lining up

Mashable: “.Amazon-powered employee tracking is coming to a warehouse, and possibly a store, near you.  The ecommerce, logistics, and (among other things) cloud computing giant quietly previewed Tuesday new hardware and software development kits (SDK) which add machine learning and computer vision capabilities to companies’ existing surveillance camera networks. And in what should come as no surprise as companies around the world ramp up employee monitoring, customers are already champing at the bit to sic Amazon’s tech on their own workers.  Amazon, of course, is notorious for monitoring its fulfillment center workers’ movements in excruciating detail. From social-distance tracking systems to automatic tools that keep tabs on “the rates of each individual associate’s productivity,” Amazon has a well deserved reputation for invasiveness. AWS Panorama, shown off at the AWS re:Invent conference, offers some version of that future to companies willing to cough up the cash.  And while Amazon partially advertises the new system as allowing “you to monitor workplace safety,” corporate customers clearly have a different purpose in mind.

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