Employee surveillance in times of remote work
Undeniably, COVID-19 has created the perfect storm in employee surveillance and further jeopardized boundaries of right to individual privacy. New tools proved to be often “crossing a line” on workers privacy and jeopardizing their labor rights, by diving deep into their home settings. Number of employers who opted for use of live webcam feeds, mouse and keyboard tracking, face tracking, and even emotion recognition in order to monitor their employees working from home skyrocketed during pandemic. Software providers such as Hubstaff or Time Doctor, which take screenshots of employees to capture their productivity, reported seeing demand almost triple since the pandemic spread across the globe. Other apps are providing employers with the granular data on how often employees are typing or interacting with their machine. These raw results can be then cross-referenced against corresponding screenshots, activity logs, audit trails, and offer a complete profile of employees' online activity.
The project dubbed "All-seeing eye: employee surveillance in times of remote work" aims to offer empirical assessment of the intrusiveness and reasonableness of emerging work surveillance technologies at work, and to contribute to the national policy making at the intersection of the protection of labour rights and right to privacy. The project builds on the CENTER’s Future of Work program that focuses on the changing of the character of work in the context of the digital transformation.