The old and new ways your employer is watching you: How are they doing it, and how invasive is it?
In this post, Luc Cousineau, Ariane Ollier-Malaterre, and Xavier Parent-Rocheleau reflect on their piece ‘Employee Surveillance Technologies: Prevalence, Classification, and Invasiveness’, which appeared in the 21(4) issue of Surveillance & Society.
Your boss is watching you. But you already knew that.
What you perhaps did not know is that in today’s digital era, employee surveillance has evolved from the traditional manager’s watchful eye to a complex network of technological surveillance tools. These tools are capable of tracking an employee’s every move, even monitoring physiological metrics like body temperature. The transformation from human eyes to tech tools for surveillance has been driven by rapid technological advancements, amplified by the seismic shift in work cultures catalyzed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Our recent article in Surveillance & Society examines the prevalence of these technologies, provides a classification system for understanding them, and offers a typology to assess their invasiveness.
Coworker.org, a non-profit organization dedicated to monitoring employee surveillance, has cataloged over 645 surveillance products, indicating widespread usage. Studies suggest that 50% to 60% of US employers use non-traditional monitoring methods, extending beyond conventional email, network, and work cell phone monitoring. These technologies span a wide spectrum, from basic mouse movement and click tracking to real-time screen monitoring and even under-desk heat sensors. Given the complexity and prevalence of these technologies, our aim was to establish a systematic classification system to facilitate communication among scholars, writers, and employees. We categorize them into three main groups: digital activity monitoring, camera and audio surveillance, and localization and biophysical monitoring.
Each technology, and its respective category, poses unique challenges and levels of invasiveness for employees (personal invasiveness) and the persons they interact with such as their coworkers, clients, friends, and families (social invasiveness). In our study, 75 graduate students were surveyed to rate 21 technologies based on their perceived invasiveness to themselves and their close social networks. The results clustered the technologies into three categories.
Technologies such as intermittent photos, real-time screen capture, and constant video monitoring received the highest personal invasiveness ratings, indicating significant concerns regarding real-time tracking and image capture of employees and their work environments. Similarly, email monitoring, instant message monitoring, audio surveillance, and non-visible cameras were deemed highly invasive both personally and socially.
Products that involved keylogging, content monitoring, file transfer tracking, and facial recognition were considered highly personally invasive but with moderate social implications. On the other hand, technologies like keylogging the number of keys typed, mouse movement monitoring, idle time tracking, and handwashing tracking were rated as moderately invasive for individuals but minimally invasive socially.
Our research underscores the expanding reach of employee surveillance technologies, which increasingly encroach upon the lives and privacy of employees, particularly with the rise of hybrid and remote work arrangements. We advocate for a focused discussion on defining and regulating employee surveillance to uphold employees’ privacy rights and ensure employers communicate transparently about the scope and purpose of surveillance.
