“People Behavior Metrics” – How Employers Track All that You Do At Work

​Should you be reading this blog? If you’re at work, on a computer provided for you by your employer, is the content of this blog sufficiently work-related for you to justify to your employer the time you’ve spent reading it?
 
Following your search history and the time you spend on particular websites during your working hours are just some of the most obvious ways employers track employees. Now a research paper from Cracked Labs, a non-profit based in Austria, with help from other non-governmental organizations and an Oxford scholar, have mapped out dozens of technologies that allow companies to track employees’ movements and activities at the office.
 
In “Tracking Indoor Location, Movement, and Desk Occupancy in the Workplace,” Cracked Labs demonstrates how vendors are selling technology that pairs wireless networking with Bluetooth technology to follow employees in their daily movements. The former can pinpoint the location of smartphones, laptops, and other devices employees use and often carry. Bluetooth beacons can link to badges, security cameras, and video conferencing systems to track employee behavior.
 
Quoting marketing literature from Cisco, Cracked Labs writes: “Companies can get a ‘real time view of the behavior of employees, guests, customers and visitors’ and ‘profile’ them based on their indoor movements in order to ‘get a detailed picture of their behavior.’” Tracking 138 people with 11 Wi-Fi points, Cisco claims, generated several million location records.
 
Not to be outdone, a European vendor, Spacewell, installs sensors in ceilings, next to doors, and even under desks to track “desk attendance.”
 
Nicole Kobie of ITPro reports that one in five office workers are now being monitored by some kind of activity tracker. She also reports surveys that tracked employees are 73 percent more likely to distrust their employer, and twice as likely to be job hunting as those who are not tracked in their workplace.
 
Cracked Labs concludes: “Once deployed in the name of ‘good,’ whether for worker safety, energy efficiency, or just improved convenience, these technologies normalize far-reaching digital surveillance, which may quickly creep into other purposes.”
 
It is not difficult to imagine that such surveillance could be used by a rogue manager for stalking, to find out who is gathering around the water cooler or kitchen, or to find something to embarrass an office rival. Even when these technologies are used for their stated purposes, we all lose something when privacy is degraded to this extent.
 
Now, how was that for work-related content?

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