Boffins come up with staff snooping mobiles

JAPANESE RESEARCHERS have invented a mobile phone that tracks the smallest moves of an employee carrying it and tells the boss.

The technology is designed for the sort of company that's full of psychologically disturbed managers who want to know their employees' movements.

The phone will even tell them when their staff have popped out for a fag.

Japanese phone giant KDDI Corporation has developed the technology, which detects even the tiniest movement of the user and beams the information back to a monitoring point.

It works by analysing the movement of accelerometers found in many handsets.

The phone is so sensitive it can tell when you are walking or climbing stairs and even cleaning can be identified.

Apparently the firm believes that there are enough companies that want to infringe on their employees' privacy and personal autonomy to make the phone a goer.

Philip Sugai, director of the mobile consumer lab at the International University of Japan, told the BBC that the technology was an "incredibly important innovation."

He thinks it will be vital for telemedicine where remotely monitoring or accessing an individual's personal movements is important. Of course there will be negative consequences when applied to employee tracking or salesforce optimisation, he admitted.

The KDDI system uses analytical software held on a server back at a base station to match patterns of common movements.

If a KDDI mobile phone is strapped to a cleaning worker's waist it can tell the differences between various actions performed such as scrubbing, sweeping, walking and even emptying a rubbish bin.

KDDI claims it will encourage workers to be more efficient because managers can easily evaluate their employees' performance even while they are out of the office.

Human rights group point out that is treating humans like machines. The sort of companies that will deploy such technology are of course outfits run by complete tossers who should be first against the wall when the revolution against their sociopathic behaviour takes place.

Japan has a very poor record on human rights, privacy issues and consumer rights, so that helps explain why this technology has been developed there. After all, this is a nation that has popular TV game shows where people are tortured for the amusement of the viewing audience. µ