>Electronic logging devices (ELD) are billed as a way to make roads safer by keeping truckers accountable to their allowed hours of service. But the devices raise questions about what information employers are collecting about their workers. > >"People sort of tend to view the trucker as an 'other,'" said Karen Levy, author of Data Driven: Truckers, Technology and the New Workplace Surveillance. "They maybe say … 'You know, that maybe makes sense for truckers, but it wouldn't make sense for me.'" > >"The issues truckers are facing, I think, are issues that everybody is beginning to face — particularly post-pandemic — as these technologies become used in more remote work." > >... > >In addition to logging the number of hours a driver operates the vehicles, the devices can track information such as vehicle location and speed. > >Levy said that the proliferation of ELDs has opened the doors for other monitoring systems that can monitor driving behaviours, like hard braking or swerving, and may include driver-facing cameras that use artificial intelligence to track eye movements and check for signs of drowsiness.  > >The devices don't address the factors she says are driving fatigue among many truckers, including declining wages over decades. > >... > >Using ELDs to improve safety for drivers and the public can be valuable, but potentially using that data to improve efficiency could prove problematic, she said. > >"When that surveillance is used to 'data-ify' the job and track how many deliveries that person made in a day, and pushing them to cut corners or accelerate through red lights, or causing people to urinate or defecate in bottles in their truck because they're fearful of taking any time off to tend to natural bodily functions, then I think we're using it improperly," Bednar said.

Using technology to ensure safety is a laudable goal, but as mentioned in the article, using it to maximize efficiency (or some other business metric) has proven thus far to be problematic. There should be a clear firewall between these data that are collected ostensibly for safety reasons, and a company's other business units.

edit: typo

It's been around for years in Australia with alot of the big companies. It's also used to track maintenance.

Also has been a thing in Europe for quite some time

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System has been used in Europe for decades. Here we are limited to 9 hours driving per day (with 2x10 hour exceptions permitted per week) you have to take at least 45 min break every 4 1/2 hours and you have to take a minimum of 9 hours rest between shifts. On top of this you have an allowance for total working time, which includes things like loading and doing your daily walkabound checks of your rig, there is a special setting on your electronic device so if checked by the authorities they know exactly what you have been doing .

Monitoring is one term or activity ... envasiveness is quite the other. Slavery is an actual term and not some weasel wording from Corporate.

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Yes, it's been around for so long tracking time and speed that they previously used round paper charts for the logging.

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HOS tracking has existed in the United States for decades. Its more recent that the practice went from mostly paper logs to digital tracking - which is significantly more accurate and less easily fudgable.