Many of us have transitioned to working from home during the pandemic. And it looks like this is just the beginning of a historic shift in the job market.
According to a survey from Enterprise Technology Research (ETR), the percentage of workers permanently working from home is expected to double this year. And by 2025, an estimated 70% of the workforce will be working remotely at least five days a month.
This is no longer a perk. However, this new trend has brought new problems and concerns.
The Guardian reports that bosses have started turning to “tattleware” to “keep tabs on employees working from home.” And this practice is poised to become a standard feature of remote work. But isn’t this practice a massive invasion of privacy?
The Rise Of Surveillance Software
Surveillance software programs known as “tattleware” or “bossware” have seen a significant boom during the pandemic. It was a niche market before COVID. However, things changed in March 2020 when employers were forced into creating work-from-home policies.
In April 2020, Google searched for “remote monitoring” for 212% over the previous year. In April of this year, those searches had surged another 243%.
Companies such as ActivTrak and Sneek, Time Doctors, Teramind, Teramind, Hubstaff, and Teramind are part of the surveillance software market. These companies report similar growth in potential customers to what Google has observed with searches for these products.
This type of software’s selling point allows close friends of employees to stay connected from their home computers. Managers can also monitor workflow. The software brings your office to your home. But the reality is that tattleware allows supervisors to monitor their workers’ every move.
What is Tattleware?
Tattleware offers bosses many options to monitor their employees’ online activities and assess their productivity while working remotely. These surveillance software programs give employers the power to do things like log webcam screenshots, keystrokes, and an employee’s browsing history.
Each platform offers unique features in the ever-growing bossware market. FlexiSpy allows for call-tapping, Spytech provides access to mobile devices, and NetVizor offers remote takeover.
One worker named David told The Guardian that his employer added the digital surveillance platform Sneek in his first week working from home.
David said that the program would take a live picture of him and his coworkers each minute through their company’s laptop webcams. All of the continuously changing headshots were part of a digital conference wall that all his team members could see.
If he clicked on a colleague’s face, it would unilaterally pull David and his co-worker into a video call. If anyone on David’s team caught someone wasting time on company time, they could send a screenshot of the image to a team chat through Sneek’s integration with the Slack messaging platform.
David quit three weeks after Sneek became a problem. “I signed up to manage their digital marketing,” he says. “Not to Livestream my living room.”
The Remote Monitoring Trend Isn’t Slowing Down.
Tattleware isn’t the only tool that employers can use to keep an eye on their workers. There’s been a noticeable increase in the number of bosses using their in-house IT departments to monitor emails and flag phrases.
If certain employees discuss their “salary” or a “recruiter,” the boss will get an alert that lets them know someone could be looking for a new job.
Then there are companies like Zoom, which briefly had an “attention tracking” setting, which alerted a call host if someone in the meeting wasn’t paying attention for more than 30 seconds. Zoom quickly reversed course and got rid of it.
But Microsoft kept its “productivity score” feature in its 365 suite, despite backlash from tech experts. This controversial feature rates people based on different criteria like email use and network connectivity.
According to digital researcher and privacy advocate Juan Carloz from the University of Melbourne, this spying trend isn’t going away. Despite the controversy surrounding this intrusive technology.
“There’s no real sign of this trend slowing down,” Carloz said. “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.”
It’s An Invasion Of Privacy, Right?
Sneek co-founder Del Currie says that his software is designed to replicate the office—and he fully admits it’s a total invasion of privacy.
“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.”
Carloz claims that the tattleware explosion is giving too much power to employers. He says that the line between work and play was much clearer before the pandemic because “surveillance… stopped at the door.” Now, with tattleware, an employer can spy on an employee even when they’re not at work.
An employer can monitor an employee’s use of a spy-enabled laptop at work, even if they are not working. And, the employer would also have access to the employee’s data, like internet banking passwords and Facebook messages.
Carloz says that there are “essentially no legal protections afforded to employees in most western nations” if their boss snoops around their info in the off-hours.
“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,” Carloz says.