Ankle bracelet and bloodhounds optional.

Illustration courtesy: Shayan Mirjafari.

Just when you think that high tech gadgets cannot possibly get more invasive and up your privates, something comes along to move the bar. This week’s Big Brother news comes in the form of a press release from Dartmouth University bearing the somewhat innocuous headline: “Phones and Wearables Combine to Assess Worker Performance.”

What it describes is far from harmless. Dartmouth researchers have come up with a mobile-sensing system that judges employee performance “by monitoring the physical, emotional and behavioral well-being of workers to classify high and low performers.” I’m assuming the use of the word “well-being” in this context is ironic.

Or maybe not. The next graph paints a cheerful picture:

The new mobile-sensing system opens the way for consumer technology to help employees optimize their performance while also allowing companies to assess how individuals are doing in their jobs. The approach can be both a complement and alternative to traditional performance tools like interviews and self-evaluations.

You get that? It’s just a harmless tool to help you “optimize” your performance. No big. The app helps you do this by using your smartphone to measure your physical activity, location, phone usage and ambient light. At the same time, you’ll be wearing a fitness tracker that monitors your heart functions, sleep, stress, and body measurements like weight and calorie consumption. Location beacons placed in the home and office provide information on time at work and breaks from the desk. Read that sentence again.

The information is processed by cloud-based machine learning algorithms trained to classify workers by performance level.

The Dr. Strangelove behind this new surveillance capitalism tool is Andrew Campbell, a professor of computer science at Dartmouth who says helpfully “This is a radically new approach to evaluating workplace performance using passive sensing data from phones and wearables. Mobile sensing and machine learning might be the key to unlocking the best from every employee.”

Oh, joy. I don’t know about you but I’ve been waiting for years to have my “best” unlocked.