Here's Remote Work Control Program That Takes Your Photo Every 5 Minutes
The popularity of Sneek has increased in recent days. With its help, business owners can take pictures of their subordinates working from home every five minutes and check if they are actually doing their job.
- In the era of the growing popularity of home office, ane app, Sneek, is gaining popularity.
- Among other things, the program enables employers to take pictures with webcams every minute or five minutes to control the actions of their employees.
- It has aroused a lot of controversies, but the devs reject the accusations and emphasize that it is not about spying.
Home office - due to the coronavirus epidemic, these two words have recently become very popular in the corporate world. In the face of the growing number of confirmed infections, more and more companies are deciding that theit employees should, if possible, work remotely from their homes. However, there is one problem with this model - how can directors control whether their subordinates are actually doing what they should be doing, or indulging in other entertainment? This is where Sneek comes in.
Sneek is available in free and paid version (for 8.50 euro per month). Its key function is the so-called "face wall", consisting of shots from webcams of the team members. Every one or five minutes the app takes a picture (with their knowledge and consent, of course), so that the company's managers can be sure that the work goes on in the right way and the employees can see their friends from the office without having to leave home. What's more, there is also an option to immediately start a conversation with a selected team member by clicking on their photo.
In an interview with Business Insider, Del Currie, Sneek's co-creator, revealed that the number of registrations on the platform has increased tenfold over the past few weeks. Currently, the program has over 10 thousand users, including employees and management of such giants as American Express and Lego.
However, the growing popularity of Sneek has raised some moral dilemmas. For example, a few days ago, David Heinemeier Hansson, co-founder of Basecamp and co-author of a book about remote working, wrote on Twitter that he was disgusted and anxious about such an idea of controlling his subordinates. As a result, not very pleasant news began to flow to the authors. However, Currie calms the mood.
"Sneek was never designed to spy on anyone, we'd be the worst spy company ever considering we named our app 'Sneek,'" Currie said. "We know lots of people will find it an invasion of privacy, we 100% get that, and it's not the solution for those folks, but there's also lots of teams out there who are good friends and want to stay connected when they're working together.
(…)We've worked from home for 10+ years and one of the biggest things that start to creep in is that sense of isolation, it does really affect people's mental health. Just having that ability to look up and see your teammates there can make all the difference."
It is not difficult to admit that constant contact with friends, including those from work, can improve mental health, especially in crisis situations like the one we are currently witnessing. But doesn't Sneek sometimes cross a certain line? Everyone has to answer this question for themselves.
