Working under surveillance; Global sales of employee-monitoring technology are at an all-time high

BY MICHAEL THOMAS

So, your company has allowed you to work from home for the last two years now, and you were very excited about this move until you found out that you now live with the boss over your shoulder in your own house.

It is said that everything in life comes with a price tag attached, and from the findings of this deal it looks like even working from home has its pitfalls. It’s all for your safety according to these companies that spend millions to make sure that you are indeed working.

It has been proven now that more and more companies have been using high-tech software to look over their employee’s shoulders in real-time.

Brian Kropp, Vice President of Research, Gartner said, “One of the biggest concerns that executives had when the pandemic first started is that we’re going to move all of these employees to work from home, and all that’s going to happen is that they’re going to take naps during the day.”

Here are some of the things that these companies’ spyware or software looks for.

Different ways just to measure activity; when did you log in? When did you log off? Who are you emailing? What sort of websites are you going to? Using your camera on your laptop to track your facial expressions, what you’re doing, trying to get feedback from what you’re looking at and what your face is expressing, and it might interest you to know that companies are looking to tell if you’re frustrated, if you’re tired, or if you’re asleep.

Before the pandemic, Kropp estimates that less than 30% of the bigger companies aka the Fortune 1000 companies have been using some sort of tracking software, but that number has jumped to 60%, according to Kropp.

On a lighter note, employees are trying very hard to outwit the technology, as global sales of employee-monitoring technology are at an all-time high and could reach almost $7 billion by the next five years.

While employers have a right to view what you do on company time, employees need to be aware that if the company provided the cell phone, they are using that company can know exactly where they are.

Albert Fox Cahn a lawyer, an activist on privacy and technology issues, and founder of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, also known as STOP, says laws have failed to keep up with the threat to privacy surveillance tools pose.

As we speak, seven states including New York have laws overseeing employee monitoring, and these laws range from simply informing employees they are subject to surveillance, to outlawing non-consensual home surveillance and biometrics.

Cahn said that storing all this data could cause companies to face huge liabilities especially as data is usually susceptible to hackers.

Some still believe that what these companies are doing is not all that bad and maybe good for the employees in the end.

For instance, if an employee is overworked, this data can help the company to reduce his or her workload, if another is very creative or innovative, he or she can be rewarded by the company for his or her efforts.

When all is said and done there are serious downsides to this practice, as Cahn revealed, “Biometric data can be re-sold.” That’s the information about any part of our body: our face, our iris, and our retina, even the way we walk. There are facial recognition vendors that are collecting not millions, but billions of photos of all of us to create tracking tools that they can sell to police, sell to corporate customers, and sell to anyone willing to pay. There is a risky downside to the company acting like Big Brother.

As the older folks would say, “Fire can be a good servant, but a bad master.” It all depends on the purpose it is being used for.