Boeing cancels its workplace surveillance program, will be ‘removing the sensors that have been installed’ — less than a day after The Seattle Times requested comment about leaked information

Boeing announced late Friday that it is canceling a workplace occupancy program that would install camera sensors in its offices, less than a day after The Seattle Times made the program public.

The company said in an email that the program “has been cancelled, and we are removing the sensors that have been installed.”

The decision followed negative reaction streaming in to managers from employees concerned about their privacy. Seattle Times reader comments showed a similar outcry.

These sensors, mounted in ceiling tiles above workstations, conference rooms and common areas, consist of motion detectors and cameras, as well as light, heat and noise detectors, that Boeing said it would use to gather data on building use for “managing energy and space usage.”

But despite Boeing’s assurances that personally identifiable information would not be gathered, many employees objected to what was seen as unwarranted surveillance.

Last week, Boeing informed employees in Everett that this “workplace occupancy sensor” system would be installed in the main engineering office towers there.

After The Times inquired about the project Thursday, Boeing sent a statement saying it was “pausing” the program at all locations companywide.

On Friday, the newspaper received further information from Boeing employees angry about the prospect of cubicle-by-cubicle workplace surveillance.

The new information, subsequently confirmed by Boeing, included that the system had already been installed at a Boeing office building across the street from Seattle’s Museum of Flight and had been in use there since September.

In addition, an employee at Boeing’s helicopter unit in Philadelphia shared with The Times information about the cost of the system.

The internal data, dated Nov. 11, showed that Boeing planned to install 2,180 of the sensors in eight office buildings at the Boeing Philadelphia site at $472 per unit — a total cost of $1,029,900.

The Philadelphia site is much smaller than Boeing’s major facilities in the Puget Sound region and others around the country. Outfitting all of Boeing’s facilities with this system clearly would have cost millions of dollars.

Boeing said Friday “we did not pursue the (Philadelphia) proposal.”

Several Puget Sound-area employees, all of whom asked for anonymity to protect their jobs, expressed concern about the plan Friday.

One Boeing business staffer in Seattle worried about the potential expansion of the system’s scope over time.

Throughout, Boeing insisted the system was benign.

A Boeing PowerPoint deck explained that the ceiling cameras take only blurry photos and that artificial intelligence then analyzes the occupancy of the space by comparing these indistinct images and infrared motion detection data to a previously uploaded map of the space.

Boeing assured employees that facilities leadership would be able to see only aggregated data.

“The quality of these images is so low that personal information cannot be identified and printed documents cannot be read,” the presentation states.

Yet the employee who shared the internal Philadelphia site information insisted he’d seen images from the sensors that are “not at all blurry as the company claims.”

“Big Brother is watching!” that employee wrote.

A press release from the vendor — Cincinnati-based Avuity — that sold the sensor equipment to Boeing claims the system is capable of “independently monitoring the utilization of 20 individual desks with a single sensor, and reporting both active and passive occupancy.”

A report published last month by Cracked Labs — a Vienna-based nonprofit studying how digital surveillance technology tracks personal data and threatens privacy — concluded that “tracking and analyzing employees’ desk presence, indoor location and movements represents intrusive behavioral monitoring and profiling.”

One building industry official wrote to defend the practice of installing such systems.

Patrick Gerding, a Seattle-based sales representative for a company that installs similar occupancy sensor systems in buildings, said in an email there’s no reason to be alarmed by the technology.

Occupancy sensor cameras shouldn’t be labeled “surveillance systems,” he said, since their purpose is to manage the buildings and help tailor the demand for lighting, noise, temperature and energy use.

Such technology is “deployed widely across corporations and commercial real estate,” Gerding wrote.

But when employees balked at all these assurances and remained incensed at the concept Friday, Boeing pulled the plug.