Oh. Like MS Teams that changes my status if I stop moving my mouse for one minute?

Ontario requires employers of a certain size (>= 25, IIRC) to have a written policy on remote employee tracking. This has been a great bit of transparency, and has helped ward employers against actually tracking remote workers. I hope the rest of the country follows suit.

Something that may also end up putting pressure on these paranoid tin-pot dictators, too, is asking during job interviews whether the company monitors keystrokes, and, if they do, why they don’t trust their employees to be professionals.

this is one of the reasons i asked for a linux pc, they told me to install the OS myself… well sure there are no Spyware

Companies don’t trust their workers because they don’t treat them well enough to earn their trust.

So to avoid the trust issue they just implement more and more draconian techniques to make up for the lack of pay/vacation/respect.

It honestly might even be cheaper than just being nice to your employees. So yay? Profit?

I personally do not trust any company provided equipment. I would never do anything untoward within the eye of their cameras. I work from home and I set up a second wireless network for all my work gear, and firewall rules to prevent them from talking to anything on my networks. I also use an external webcam that is usually turned off (electrically, as in no power flowing), and even my microphone goes through a sound board that can completely turn off. Bonus points is that I can also turn my mic down on my board, or pad it to hell and back and even if the meeting software lies about me being muted, I know for sure thanks to my trusted hardware.

Sounds like an arms race due to mutual distrust.

Surveillance cold war?

I’ve worked in IT for 20+ years, only in cases where management thinks a particular person isn’t working, it doesn’t happen. Cost plus IT departments are generally understaffed and don’t have time to monitor this kind of thing makes it a non-starter

Thankful to have a union that’d fight this.

‘Probably’ or ‘Might Be?’ I doubt this is as common as the article makes it out to be. IT departments have much better things to spend their time on and a good CTO will stop the nonsense before it starts.

You’ll know if your employees are ‘slacking off’ because, like the article even states, their work won’t be getting done.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

In Australia, a woman said she was fired from her consultant role after her employer’s monitoring software found “very low keystroke activity” on her laptop between October and December.

Time Doctor has seen business pick up over the past few years as remote work has taken off, Borja said, and the return-to-office movement hasn’t eliminated the demand for employee-tracking software.

A March Resume Builder survey of 1,000 US business leaders with a primarily remote or hybrid workforce found that 96% of them use some form of employee-monitoring software, sometimes called bossware, to monitor worker productivity.

JPMorgan’s monitoring system, for instance, tracks everything from office attendance to time spent composing emails, Insider reported last year.

At Tesla’s New York plant, workers told Bloomberg that the company tracks how active they are on their computers — and that they’ve avoided taking bathroom breaks as a result.

Refusing to turn on your webcam during a meeting, for instance, could give your employer the right to fire you if you live in the US, legal experts previously told Insider.

The original article contains 678 words, the summary contains 175 words. Saved 74%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

It’s insane how the metrics used to spy on employees have almost nothing to do with productivity!

Someone using a pad of paper and a pencil to take notes, voice-to-text to write email, or who is extremely skilled at using their office software will show up as “unproductive” using these metrics.

It quite literally rewards people for being inefficient. A task that takes a productive worker 10 minutes to complete can be dragged on for an hour so they look busy.

This level of micromanagement is a red flag that the managers aren’t doing their jobs.