A story run by the Guardian recently which was interesting in this little “work from home” world we’re living in at the moment which discusses Boss’s turning to “tattle ware” to keep tabs on what their staff are doing when working from home.
Some people that were interviewed to discuss this new software spoke of their experiences; “Within my first week of remote work, Davo (not real name) and his team were introduced to a digital surveillance platform called “Sneek.”
“Every minute or so, the program would capture a live photo of Davo 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.”
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 Davo, though, Sneek was a dealbreaker. He quit after less than three weeks on the job. “I signed up to manage their digital marketing,” “not to livestream my living room” fair enough. Remote surveillance software like Sneek, also known as “tattleware” or “boss ware”, 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.
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.
Whether all 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. I was a Sales Rep for many years, and we would have various Dashboard trackers on our equipment, laptops, phones even our vehicles.
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. “Another study 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”.
In other studies, 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”. Rightly or wrongly, it seems surveillance software is being framed as a trade-off for remote work.
Adding on to this LinkedIn decided to conduct a survey themselves asking people “Would you be happy for your employer to monitor your work?” Interestingly 33% of people said yes if they tell me, while 56% said no it was a privacy violation. It’s like when you’re driving towards a breath test, some people panic, some do a U turn…. why because they have had a drink and then got behind the wheel. If you’re not doing the wrong thing, then you shouldn’t be worried.
I don’t mind my boss being aware of the work I’m doing, signing on/off, keystrokes etc but I do have an issue with her accessing me through my camera whenever she wants. Computers can be hacked and then anyone and everyone can be in my home office when they want to be, and it is difficult to think your integrity is being questioned and needing it in the first place. I think if employers are transparent to staff around their reasoning for adding this software in the first place, then there should not be too many issues.