[dsr_]

I wonder if WeWork has already started an espionage (excuse me, business intelligence) program or whether that's a future development.

Consider: an ordinary landlord knows how many desks you have, how many people show up on an average day, and how much garbage/recycling you put out. WeWork has operatives who can measure what percentage of your employees' days are spent at their desks, what they like to do for fun, when they are taking trips, where they are going, all their internet usage, how much they print (and if they cared, the contents of all print jobs), what they underline or circle on whiteboards. And of course, they can cross-correlate that across thousands of tenant companies, some of whom are certainly in competition with each other, and some of whom are listed on the stock markets already. Some of whom are no doubt conducting mergers, talks to be acquired... there's a wealth of non-public information that WeWork has access to. How long until they start to take advantage from it?

[blfr]

I bet this data is worth (much) less than the cost to collect and analyse it.

It would be worth something for larger companies but for these WeWork will have only limited insight since they're unlikely to rent all or even a significant share of their total space from one provider. Lead generation is probably the ceiling.

Maybe they could do some targeted advertising/deals for various additional services. But probably not even that. Let's say they wanted to provide accounting services. Can they beat Mabel Luna? Will they have someone to answer a quick question about cash flow or depreciation?

[RankingMember]

Sounds like a good way to create an opening for a WeWork competitor to swoop in and eat their lunch. Companies get a whiff of that kind of level of tech monitoring even being a possibility and any CSO will have them scrambling for the door.

[dsr_]

Since that didn't happen with Facebook, Google or Amazon, why would you think it would happen with WeWork?

(WeWork is valued around $22,000,000,000, about the same as GOOG's IPO.)

[RankingMember]

WeWork is basically a real estate business, not a tech company. The barrier to entry to create a competitor is not exceptionally high, technology-wise. Not so with the companies you mentioned.

[nabnob]

That's exactly what their plan is:

>Fano sees WeWork buildings as one giant sensor for data collection, and he wants to map them down to the object. Understanding the space means understanding how to make it more efficient and better for members.

https://www.businessinsider.com/weworks-secret-weapon-will-b...

[lancesells]

They are doing this: https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/07/wework-just-acquired-spati...

[yxc]

Yeah, a decade ago the company you worked for had your highly personal data.

Now Slack, GSuite and others practically have the salary and work history of millions of programmers. Everyone seems to be totally okay with that.

[buboard]

well why wouldn't they? as long as people treat it as a workplace (i.e. they dont print their love letters there) its a good opportunity for some neat travel advertising etc.

[slig]

I don't understand your point. Are you suggesting that people that pay a co-working space to work there should accept that whatever they're printing (most likely they're also paying for the pages they're printing) can be read by the co-working space?

[blfr]

I don't know if they should accept it but realistically vast majority of companies don't have any valuable secrets. Maybe payroll data and perhaps the client list would be somewhat sensitive. Still difficult to act on for anything but price discrimination.