Employee monitoring software

From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia

Employee monitoring software is a means of employee monitoring, and allows company administrators to monitor and supervise all their employee computers from a central location.[1] It is normally deployed over a business network and allows for easy centralized log viewing via one central networked PC. Sometimes, companies opt to monitor their employees using remote desktop software instead.[2]

Purpose[edit]

Employee monitoring software is used to supervise employees' performance, prevent illegal activities, avoid confidential info leakage, and catch insider threats. Nowadays employee monitoring software is widely used in technology companies.[3]

Features[edit]

An employee monitoring program can monitor almost everything on a computer, such as keystrokes and passwords inputted, websites visited, chats in Facebook Messenger, Skype and other social chats. A piece of monitoring software can also capture screenshots of mobile activities. E-mail monitoring includes employers having access to records of employee’s e-mails that are sent through the company’s servers.[4] Companies may use keyword searches to natural language processing to analyze e-mails.[4] The administrator can view the logs through a cloud panel, or receive the logs by email.

Criticism[edit]

Bossware, also known as tattleware, is software that allows supervisors to automatically monitor the productivity of their employees. Common features of bossware include activity monitoring, screenshotting and/or screen recording, keystroke logging, webcam and/or microphone activation, and "invisible" monitoring.[5][6][7][8][9] Bossware has been called a form of spyware.[6][9] During the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of bossware by companies to monitor their employees increased.[8][10]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) denounced bossware as a violation of privacy.[7] The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) denounced bossware as a threat to the safety and health of employees.[11]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, members of the r/antiwork subreddit shared various mouse jiggler strategies to combat bossware intended to monitor the productivity of remote workers.[6]

A study by Reports and Data predicts that the global market for employee remote monitoring software will hit $1.3 billion by 2027.[12]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ "What Is Employee Monitoring Software? (with pictures)". wiseGEEK. Archived from the original on 2018-01-02. Retrieved 2018-01-02.
  2. ^ "What is employee monitoring?". WhatIs.com. Archived from the original on 16 February 2018. Retrieved 16 February 2018.
  3. ^ Ciocchetti, Corey A. (2011). "The Eavesdropping Employer: A Twenty-First Century Framework for Employee Monitoring". American Business Law Journal. 48 (2): 285–369. doi:10.1111/j.1744-1714.2011.01116.x. ISSN 1744-1714.
  4. ^ a b Spitzmüller, Christiane; Stanton, Jeffrey M. (June 2006). "Examining employee compliance with organizational surveillance and monitoring". Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology. 79 (2): 245–272. doi:10.1348/096317905x52607. ISSN 0963-1798.
  5. ^ Gilliland, Donald (2021-07-24). "Warning: Your boss is probably spying on you — and it could be bad for your health". The Hill. Retrieved 2021-12-22.
  6. ^ a b c Cole, Samantha (2021-12-08). "Workers Are Using 'Mouse Movers' So They Can Use the Bathroom in Peace". Vice. Retrieved 2021-12-22.
  7. ^ a b Cyphers, Bennett; Gullo, Karen (2020-06-30). "Inside the Invasive, Secretive "Bossware" Tracking Workers". Electronic Frontier Foundation. Retrieved 2021-12-22.
  8. ^ a b Klosowski, Thorin (2021-02-10). "How Your Boss Can Use Your Remote-Work Tools to Spy on You". The New York Times. Retrieved 2021-12-22.
  9. ^ a b Crispin, Jessa (2021-09-16). "Employers are spying on us at home with 'tattleware'. It's time to track them instead". The Guardian. Retrieved 2021-12-22.
  10. ^ ‘Bossware is coming for almost every worker’: the software you might not realize is watching you The Guardian. 2022.
  11. ^ Scherer, Matt (2021-09-16). "Strategies to Tackle Bossware's Threats to the Health & Safety of Workers". Center for Democracy and Technology. Retrieved 2021-12-22.
  12. ^ "Workplace monitoring platform Aware takes in $60M". VentureBeat. 2021-10-13. Retrieved 2022-08-09.
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