Walmart, Delta, Chevron and Starbucks are using AI to monitor employee messages

That's a really interesting point. By forcing more surveillance of casual chat, they're also risking confidential information being discussed on outside channels.

employees increasingly establishing secret outside-of-the-company communication

Like they've not made a WhatsApp group already lmao

This is already a thing. I'm part of a 25k person Discord server for Amazon/AWS employees both current and former. We often discussed a ton about the company's inner workings, navigating the toxic AF environment, and helping people find other jobs. Nothing ever trade secret level, but that Discord would give any competitor a massive leg up in direct competition with Amazon.

And then comes the attempts at criminilization

And these companies will pay a small fine and continue doing it anyway

In a two-party-consent state, maybe.

But in a one-party-consent state, all that Personnel Human Resources People Ops will do is point to a clause in your onboarding paperwork where you agreed to be recorded while on company property using company telephony equipment as a condition of your employment.

It's already been ocurring for a while now without the summary and analysis by AI.

Automatic audio transcription has been kicking around for a long time now, at various levels of accuracy. The only important distinction of the speaking party is which side of the call (employee or customer) it's coming from, and that doesn't require any complicated analysis, just that your recordings capture incoming and outgoing audio on separate channels (which is how phone calls work in the first place).

As far as consent goes, any time you hear "this call may be monitored for training purposes" and stay on the line, as a customer you have consented to the recording. As an employee they usually just include it in your contract or one of the many things they get every employee to sign. Only really matters from a business standpoint if someone is willing to take you to court over it.

Most call center software/systems have these options built in at this point.

There seems to be a shocking amount of people that expect any amount of privacy on corporate owned systems, property, or hardware.

As someone in tech: as much as I don't give a singular speck of interest in spying on what you're doing, intensive monitoring of every single thing happening within the company systems is important and useful. Often these logs are vitally necessary for things like malware detection and remediation, data exfiltration detection and investigation, investigation into system and network issues, legal investigations or action (both for us, and when subpeona'd).

The amount of data we log, and I have access to, on employees actions on our systems is disturbing. But I would be lying if said that I haven't encountered a legitimate need for a shocking amount of it.