<https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/24/remote-work-from-home-surveillance/>
When Kerrie Krutchik, an attorney for 34 years, was hired this spring
for one of the legal field’s fastest-growing jobs, she expected to
review case files at a pandemic-safe distance from the comfort of her
Ohio home.
Then she received a laptop in the mail with her instructions: To get
paid, she’d have to comply with a company-mandated facial recognition
system for every minute of her contract. If she looked away for too many
seconds or shifted in her chair, she’d have to scan her face back in
from three separate angles, a process she ended up doing several times a
day.
For Krutchik, the laptop’s unblinking little camera light quickly became
a nightmare — and a reminder of what her new work day might look like
even after the pandemic fades. After two weeks, she ended her contract
and pledged never to consent to that kind of monitoring again.
“It’s just this constant, unnecessary, nerve-racking stress: You’re
trying to concentrate and in the back of your mind you know you’re on
camera the entire time,” she said. “While you’re reviewing a document,
you don’t know who is reviewing you.”
The spread of the delta variant has kept many of America’s office
employees working from home and fueled a rise in surveillance
technologies by employers — in finance, law, technology and other
industries — eager to keep tabs on their remote workforce. The facial
recognition monitoring Krutchik experienced offers one of the stranger
examples of America’s massive work-from-home experiment, because it
relies on a glitchy and, to some, quite creepy camera system built to
ensure workers don’t lose focus or break the rules.
The adoption of the technology coincides with an increase in
companies’use of more traditional monitoring software
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/04/30/work-from-home-surveillance/?itid=lk_inline_manual_12>,
which can track an employee’s computer keystrokes, take screenshots and
in some cases record audio or video while they are working from home.
Sometimes, this is done without their knowledge, which means companies
have the potential to gain access to employees’ private details like
banking or health information.
Workers have little power to control how and when they’re being
monitored, especially if they are using work-issued devices. Experts
advise workers to assume they are being monitored if they’re in the
office or using company equipment, and recommend they read the fine
print when in comes to employee contracts.
Market research firm Gartner**says companies used more surveillance
tools during the coronavirus
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/coronavirus/?itid=lk_inline_manual_14>
pandemic to keep tabs on employees and monitor work productivity. The
number of large employers using tools to track their workers doubled
since the beginning of the pandemic to 60 percent. That number is
expected**to rise to 70 percent within the next three years, said Brian
Kropp, chief of human resources research at Gartner.
Federal government to expand use of facial recognition despite growing
concerns
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/25/federal-facial-recognition-expansion/?itid=lk_interstitial_manual_15>
And the software**is expected to become even**more sophisticated,
telling employers how to turn the data they collect into actionable
measures to drive the business. Soon it might do things like tell
managers how employees work together via Zoom, understand who the main
contributors are and how specific patterns may lead to specific results.
“That’s going to be the evolution of the monitoring,” Kropp said.
Companies say the tracking offers a critical way to ensure
theiremployees are staying productive
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/04/30/work-from-home-surveillance/?itid=lk_inline_manual_20>and
telling the truth about how much they work when their bosses are many
miles away. Some employers have voiced concerns that, without the
monitoring, their workers might cut corners or pursue multiple jobs
simultaneously, depriving them of the focus and labor they need to stay
competitive in the remote-work era.
Help Desk: Ask our tech team your tech questions
<https://hosted-washpost.submissionplatform.com/sub/hosted/5c7808290310870034cc0d8f>
Brad Edward, CEO of Spekless Cleaning in Arlington, VA, said he has been
using monitoring software from Hubstaff at his company for about five
years. The reason? He needs a reliable time tracking system for his
local and remote office workers who help with operations.
But Spekless is not interested in checking on exactly what employees are
doing throughout the day because Edward believes privacy is an important
part of the employer-employee relationship.
“Ultimately as an employer your goal is to foster a culture of
collaboration and mutual trust,” he said. “These tools can either work
with you or against you, depending on how you use them.”
Still, many workers say they are increasingly worried about the level of
surveillance.
David, who spoke on the condition that his last name remain anonymous,
was working as a customer service agent for a financial tech company in
Utah when the pandemic started, and he was sent to work from home. Last
fall, after his company switched the software it asked employees to use
on their work-issued computers, he was randomly clicking around the
system trying to figure out how to get where he needed to be. Suddenly,
his boss started speaking to him through his headset, instructing him on
how to log in. David said he couldn’t recall exactly what software the
company used, but he was surprised to find that his boss could see what
he was doing, a seemingly new capability at the company.
“I was upstairs with my boys, and I get a text from my husband (David)
that said, ‘If you come down here, don’t say anything and let me know
because we’re being listened to,’” said David’s wife, Rebekah.
When David brought the issue up at a company meeting, he found out the
company could listen to his audio at any time, not just during calls
that are often monitored for quality purposes. But now David was at home
with his wife and children. The situation had changed, but the
monitoring had not adapted to the privacy he expected while working from
home.
“[I felt] paralyzed,” David said. “Like I couldn’t say anything without
potential repercussions.”
Within a month of the discovery, David quit his job.
Ashley, who spoke on the condition of being identified only by her first
name to avoid employment repercussions, said the banking start-up she
was working for in New York implemented surveillance software about 10
days after the company sent employees to work from home last year. The
company asked them to download Hubstaff, a software program that tracks
productivity in part by recording keystrokes and taking screenshots, on
their personal computers. The request was out of the question for
Ashley, who was**furloughed for refusing to download the software before
getting a new job altogether.
“I have so much information on my computer: my banking information, my
passwords, my email that has stuff from my doctors,” she said. “I just
wouldn’t want my employers to have access to this.”
While she tried to take up the issue with human resources, she saw a
change in how her colleagues worked. The company expected employees to
have an 85 percent or higher “activity level,” which is calculated based
on keystrokes and mouse movement. Anyone who didn’t meet expectations
was docked pay. To avoid that, Ashley said her co-workers began sending
each other more messages to meet their keystrokes rather than lose time
thinking through a complex problem.
“People just stopped caring [about the job],” she said.
The tension between employees and employers around the level of
monitoring comes down to trust and transparency, experts say. If
employees aren’t given the full details of when and how they’re
monitored and if they don’t feel trusted at work, they’re more likely to
refuse monitoring of any kind regardless of the purpose.
“Employers have to be upfront and honest about the extent of the
monitoring,” said John Verdi, vice president of policy at data
privacy-focused think tank Future of Privacy Forum, which is funded by
Big Tech companies including Facebook and Google. “And employees have to
be upfront and honest about what they view is their obligation in their
jobs.”
Attorneys required to use the new face-scanning software
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/02/08/dangers-facial-recognition-software/?itid=lk_inline_manual_47>
while working from home said they understood the need for security
because reviewing sensitive documents is part of the job. But many felt
the remote-work surveillance had gone too far. The facial recognition
systems, they said, felt intrusive, dysfunctional or annoying, booting
them out of their work software if they shifted in their seat, rested
their eyes, adjusted their glasses, wore a headband or necklace, went to
the bathroom or had a child walk through their room.
Even more problematically, some facial recognition systems have been
shown in research to perform worse with people of color because the
algorithms are less accurate at identifying people with darker skin
tones. That leaves many attorneys fearful that they could be penalized
due to the color of their skin. Three attorneys, all of whom are Black,
said they’d routinely struggled to be recognized by the face-scanning
systems in a way that their lighter-skinned colleagues did not.
Several couldn’t help but note the irony that their careers in consumer
privacy and employment law had led them to a role they felt pushed the
boundaries on both.
“The true currency an attorney has is trust … and the technology they’re
using to monitor what attorneys are doing puts that trust into
question,” said Gerald Edwards, a New York City attorney practicing
since 1994. “Are you even trusting me at all, that you have to watch me
and monitor me like a 4-year-old?”
Experts say monitoring often doesn’t accomplish management’s goals
unless leaders set clear-cut, realistic objectives customized to each
team and its needs. But the pandemic triggered panic among many
companies that suddenly had to allow their employees to work from home
for the first time.
“It seems like a lot of people confused monitoring with management,”
said Alison Green, work advice columnist who runs the Ask a Manager
website and received numerous complaints about employee surveillance
during the pandemic. “You don’t always need this level of micromanaging.”
Laszlo Bock, CEO and co-founder of human resource software service Humu
and former Google executive, said the pandemic created a sudden instinct
in leaders to increase the level of control as workers went remote.
“The paradox is every manager is also an employee, and they have a
manager,” he said. “If you ask [managers] what they want from their
manager, it’s to stay out of their way.”
Legally, employers usually have the upper hand when it comes to
monitoring, said Marta Manus, an attorney at San Diego-based Marble Law
Firm. Often, employees are unaware that the policies they sign upon
their hiring include terms that cover work surveillance such as
monitoring through laptop cameras or computer software. Manus said
employees should be wary and ask for specifics about any monitoring
policy as well as who will have access to that data. But if workers hope
to sue their employers for invasion of privacy, they have the burden to
prove damages.
“If it’s a company device, you have zero expectation of privacy,” she
said. “If it’s a personal device, as long as there are clear policies in
place in favor of monitoring for work purposes, the law is going to
permit it.”
Employee monitoring software provider Teramind says its number of
customers has increased by three to four times during the pandemic. And
many small and midsize employers who were on the fence about purchasing
the software at the beginning of the pandemic are now making the
purchase as they move to permanent remote work options.
Teramind has two versions of monitoring software, one in which employees
know they’re being monitored and can switch on or off, and one where
employers have control of the monitoring. Eli Sutton, Teramind’s vice
president of operations, said the company advises its clients to tell
their employees that they’re using the software as well as explain the
productivity goals. The knowledge alone on average translates into a 30
percent spike in productivity versus secretly monitoring employees,
Sutton said. The reason is because employees know what specific goals
they have to reach and that they’re being monitored for those goals, he
said.
Hubstaff said it logged a record month in March 2020, and since the
beginning of the pandemic, customers have increased by 40 percent.
Currently, more than 70,000 companies and organizations use Hubstaff.
But Hubstaff said most employers want their employees to understand how
the software works and know what’s being tracked.
[...]
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