https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/05/covid-coronavirus-work-home-office-surveillance
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Every minute or so, the program would capture a live photo of David and
his workmates via their company laptop webcams. The ever-changing
headshots were splayed across the wall of a digital conference waiting
room that everyone on the team could see. Clicking on a colleague’s face
would unilaterally pull them into a video call. If you were lucky enough
to catch someone goofing off or picking their nose, you could forward
the offending image to a team chat via Sneek’s integration with the
messaging platform Slack.
I signed up to manage their digital marketing, not to livestream my
living room
According to the Sneek co-founder Del Currie, the software is meant to
replicate the office. “We know lots of people will find it an invasion
of privacy, we 100% get that, and it’s not the solution for those
folks,” Currie says. “But there’s also lots of teams out there who are
good friends and want to stay connected when they’re working together.”
For David, though, Sneek was a dealbreaker. He quit after less than
three weeks on the job. “I signed up to manage their digital marketing,”
he tells me, “not to livestream my living room.”
Little did he realize that his experience was part of a wide-scale boom
in worker surveillance– and one that’s poised to become a standard
feature of life on the job.
Remote surveillance software like Sneek, also known as “tattleware” or
“bossware”, represented something of a niche market pre-Covid. But that
all changed in March 2020, as employers scrambled to pull together
work-from-home policies out of thin air. In April last year, Google
queries for “remote monitoring” were up 212% year-on-year; by April this
year, they’d continued to surge by another 243%.
One of the major players in the industry, ActivTrak, reports that during
March 2020 alone, the firm scaled up from 50 client companies to 800.
Over the course of the pandemic, the company has maintained that growth,
today boasting 9,000 customers – or, as it claims, more than 250,000
individual users. Time Doctor, Teramind, and Hubstaff – which, together
with ActivTrak, make up the bulk of the market – have all seen similar
growth from prospective customers.
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These software programs give bosses a mix of options for monitoring
workers’ online activity and assessing their productivity: from
screenshotting employees’ screens to logging their keystrokes and
tracking their browsing. But in the fast-growing bossware market, each
platform potentially brings something new to the table. There’s
FlexiSpy, which offers call-tapping; Spytech, which is known for mobile
device access; and NetVizor, which has a remote takeover feature.
Tattleware platforms are hardly the sole culprits of expanded workplace
surveillance. Employers are reportedly drawing on in-house IT
departments to monitor emails for flagged phrases at an increased rate
compared with before the pandemic. By receiving alerts when certain
employees are discussing “recruiter” or “salary”, for example,
management hopes to know when employees are looking to up sticks for
greener pastures.
Big-name tech companies have also dipped their toes into the spy game,
with varying degrees of success. In April 2020, Zoom quickly backtracked
on a short-lived “attention tracking” setting, which alerted a call host
when a participant was focused away from the meeting for more than 30
seconds. And in December, Microsoft bowed to tech experts’ outcry over
the release of a “productivity score” feature for its 365 suite, which
rated individuals on criteria that included email use and network
connectivity; the tool no longer identifies users by name.
Despite controversy, tattleware and remote monitoring are not going away
any time soon, even as employees shift back to in-house and hybrid work
models.
The statistics seem to bear out that we are inured to the idea of some
layer of surveillance in our work lives. Photograph: Hayley
Blackledge/Alamy Stock Photo
“There’s no real sign of this trend slowing down,” says Juan Carloz, a
digital researcher and privacy advocate with the University of
Melbourne. “No sign of legislative change in any jurisdiction I can
name, and no sign of pushback from employees, even when they’re aware of
it happening.”
‘Many are all too content to let it slide’
Whether all of this amounts to corporate snooping, or just plain
accountability, depends largely on which side of the fence you sit on.
White-collar workers around the world have long taken it for granted
that their emails are monitored on the job; warehouses, offices, and
shops, meanwhile, are regularly monitored by CCTV.
The statistics seem to bear out that we are inured to the idea of some
layer of surveillance built into our professional lives. In a recent
survey, nearly three-quarters of workers said their productivity
wouldn’t be affected even if they knew their employer was monitoring them.
And while the jury’s still out on whether there’s any benefit to remote
monitoring, Elizabeth Lyons, an associate professor of management at the
University of California San Diego, is willing to play devil’s advocate.
“A study we conducted found people doing data collection work out of the
office were more productive when they were made aware they were being
monitored, compared to their colleagues who weren’t told they were being
tracked,” says Lyons. Surveillance even increased worker satisfaction,
she adds, noting that remote employees appreciate signals that their
performance is integral to the organization.
Yet Lyons acknowledges that when monitoring becomes overbearing,
employee morale will take a hit.
“In other studies we’ve looked at, the workers were essentially saying,
‘If the manager is going to watch everything I do, then I’m not going to
do anything above and beyond what they expect of me,’” says Lyons.
Then there’s the question of privacy. Carloz, the digital researcher, is
concerned that the boom in tattleware has tipped the scales too heavily
in favor of the employer.
“Prior to the pandemic, the line between work and play was [clearer] –
surveillance, in other words, stopped at the door,” says Carloz.
But the rise of tattleware changes the game. If an employee uses a
spy-enabled, work-sponsored computer outside of hours, their employer
could easily access their personal data, down to internet banking
passwords and Facebook messages.
Carloz concedes that most employers are probably not interested in
collecting their workers’ personal information. They want to know what
websites employees are on, and what tasks they’re dividing their time
on, during the workday. However, if a boss does feel like snooping
around off-hours, Carloz points out, there are “essentially no legal
protections afforded to [those employees] in most western nations”.
“But since, rightly or wrongly, [surveillance software] is being framed
as a trade-off for remote work, many are all too content to let it
slide,” says Carloz.
Which brings us back to David. In the weeks after boldly departing his
first post-college job, the young digital marketer secured a post with a
new, Sneek-free firm. He says he’s much happier for it.
“But one of the first things they asked me to do was sign up for
Hubstaff,” he laughs.
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