What the Leaking of 21 Million Employee Screenshots Tells Us About the Threat of Worker Surveillance Apps

​In the late 19th century, American business embraced the management philosophy of Frederick Winslow Taylor, author of The Principles of Scientific Management. He wrote: “In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first.”

So managers put their factory systems first by standardizing processes and performing time and motion studies with a stopwatch to measure the efficiency of workers’ every action. Nineteenth century workers, who were never first, became last.

Now intrusive surveillance technology is bringing this management philosophy to the knowledge economy. This entails not just the application of reductionism to information work, but the gross violation of employee privacy.

This was brought home when Paulina Okunyté of Cybernews reported on Thursday that WorkComposer, an employee surveillance app that measures productivity by tracking logging activity and regular screenshots of employees, left over 21 million images exposed in an unsecured bucket in Amazon’s cloud service.

WorkComposer also logs keystrokes and how much time an employee spends on an app. As a result, usernames and passwords that are visible in screenshots might enable the hijacking of accounts and breaches of businesses around the world.

“Emails, documents, and projects meant for internal eyes only are now fair game for anyone with an internet connection,” Okunyté writes.

With 21 million images to work with, there is plenty of material for cyberthieves and phishing scammers to victimize the people who work for companies that use WorkComposer software.

This incident exposes the blinkered philosophy behind employee surveillance. As we have reported, there are measurable psychological costs – and likely productivity costs – when people know that they are being constantly watched. Vanessa Taylor of Gizmodo reports that according to a 2023 study by the American Psychological Association, 56 percent of digitally surveilled workers feel tense or stressed at work compared to 40 percent of those who are not.

We also question the usefulness of such pervasive tracking and surveillance. Efficiency is a commendable goal. Surely there are broader and less intrusive ways to measure employee productivity. Such close monitoring runs the risk of focusing workers on meeting the metrics instead of bringing creativity or bursts of productivity to their jobs. Allowing people to take a break every hour to listen to a song on earbuds might, in the long run, make for better results and greater efficiency. 
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Just don’t make a funny face or sing along, the whole world might see you.

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