Lee DunaIf you work remotely, your bosses are probably using software to track you. Here's how they'll catch you slacking off.
AutoTL;DRThis 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.
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.
“Everybody in the industry talks about it — you’ve got the all-seeing eye of Big Brother watching everything the employees are doing, and it’s a little creepy,” a Time Doctor staffer told Insider in 2021.
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If I’m getting my work done, they have no reason to complain.
You would think so, but companies generally believe that they own the right to your full potential output - not just the tasks that they set you.
Which is bullshit because input is not a linear or exponential function of just time.
But you only spent 64% of your time actively working. Could you explain why is it so low?
Say no to installing closed source software and say no to installing spyware. Simple as that.
If it’s a company laptop with a company policy chances are saying no to policy is saying no to that job. While seasoned employees can do that, new employees are SOL
Melody FwygonThis is blatantly false. There are plenty of jobs out there who will hire you and not do something shitty like installing boss-ware on a computer.
If you allow or enable these employers to get away with it; you’re part of the problem. 99.5% of jobs do not require boss-ware to get done properly; and if your immediate bosses or supervisors had no problems with you before…consider it a large red flag. If you’re joining a company and they mention this; consider it a large red flag.
Nothing is false about what they said.
If you get hired to a job, the company provides a machine, you don’t get to pick what happens on it.
If you don’t like it get a new job.
Indeed many (most) remote jobs don’t have this stuff
How does this have any effect on work provided laptops? No job I’ve ever had gave me full control of the software installed in my laptop.
I was coming from a mindset you were using your own laptop or buying your own laptop.
jecht360Most companies will not require you to purchase your own work computer. I would consider that a huge red flag.
Dizzy Devil DuckyThis is why I am making sure if I ever end up in a job that requires me to use one that I will 100% be providing my own.
Norah (pup/it/she)It’s also about covering your own arse. If you have any work documents/emails/etc on a personal device, it might get taken as evidence if the company is sued. It’s not just WFH, don’t do anything work-related on a personal device.
When Can You Obtain Discovery Into Employees' Personal Devices?
The proliferation of services and devices that allow you to work whenever, wherever are directly responsible for increased blending of work life and life-life. This blending also creates potentially thorny issues in the context of discovery.
Don’t use your personal laptop for work. Don’t use your work laptop for personal stuff.
why? all my work is done in a browser in a (Chrome) work profile except for Slack. Is there really any chance they can see what I’m doing I’m Firefox outside of work hours? Wouldn’t that open them up to massive lawsuits?
This is very much so a thing that companies do. My company uses one such service. It’s just a quick install on the computer and you can’t tell that it’s even installed unless you know where to look (under Windows Services). It decides how “productive” you are based on what programs you’re using, how long you’re using them, and what sites you’re visiting in the browser. It also takes regular screenshots all day. Records every site you visit. And more.
Personally I hate these kind of monitoring things, but since management wanted it rolled out in 2020 I didn’t have a choice but to deploy it.
∟⊔⊤∦∣≶Can you give specific instructions on how to check please?
Open a window, look out. If you see America, your boss is probably spying on you
Open window, look outside. If you see Australia or America, your boss is spying on you
oce 🐆So as usual the solutions is not having windows.
Holy shit, that was brilliant
Pretty much - I have yet to see an employee monitoring service that works on Mac OSX or Linux.
There are a bunch of different services that do this, I can’t tell you how to search for all of them. It’s safer to just assume it’s there. I’m also not going to divulge which one we’re using at my company. Just wanted to give people a heads up.
What’s it called under windows services?
Can someone with knowledge please provide links, lists, specifics, because all the articles I find list like, 3 names: “Teramind, Time Doctor, StaffCop, and others.” I want to know what “others” are, how many there are, etc etc. I am actually getting quite frustrated with these articles because they talk very generally about some nebulous hypothetical dystopian employee monitoring software, without actually just fucking telling me what the fuck to look for.
that's both unreasonable and not the right way to approach this. Your assumption is that if you knew the names of all possible processes that you could then be in a position to make better decisions. the problem is names are useless - it's trivial for software to run under different names, so believing names can help you somehow is a waste of time.
Hmm OK so I’m going to have to be a bit sneakier than that then.
FarraigePlaisteachI had a weekend hard disk that I swapped with the work one. No idea if it kept me safe or not, but the OS wasn’t even the same.
This is blatantly false. Name and fucking shame each variety of software. These cockroaches can’t stand the light of public attention;. The more people who know how to spot and identify malicious and suspicious boss-ware behavior, the better. It protects the user to know that the software exists; as they can better be prepared to combat and deter abuses of this software by unprofessional and shitty bosses.
No; it isn’t going to be foolproof. That’s not the intent here. The intent is for everyone to be able to name, shame, and identify when software that their employer is deploying is going to be behaving in a manner that blatantly violates their rights to privacy in a non-constructive way that threatens them.
Nath
This can go way beyond ‘tracking’ software. I used to write software that my company used in its core business activities. Almost everyone in the company used some portion of this software. The logging for that system included timestamps and user IDs the captured general high level activities. If we had a system issue we could ramp up the logging to much more granular levels. If mgmt asked we could query the logs and get a pretty good idea of how much or little you were using the system. That wasn’t the main intent for the logging but it had been used for employee performance monitoring on more than one occasion… In all my years of coding, every app I worked on had similar logging.
If you are on a work PC, assume your activity can be monitored and/or logged in some fashion.
Add Veriato to the list. A lot of this type of Spyware is sold as “insider risk” or “behavior analytics” software.
I, unfortunately, was forced at my last job to implement and maintain this program.
Any company that does this to it’s employees is dooming itself to failure anyways. A complete lack of trust makes for a very hostile working environment; and it will generally drive employees away anyways.
I mean the article is on “Business Insider”…
EamesHow can I check if my laptop has such software installed?
PeachManIf it’s a work laptop, treat it like it has tracking software on it. Don’t use your work computer for personal stuff that you don’t want your employer to see. Period.
Well, thx. But this was not my question.
akimAs there are dozens of different ways to track different stuff, this can’t be answered easily. Try to open the task manager and examine the processes is a start.
But that’s only for tracking software. You could also examine the data you create Server-Side and just assume stuff. Like: you are away in teams and you haven’t touched files in Sharepoint for 60mins, so we assume you don’t work right now.
OmnipotentEntityDisclaimer, I have not studied the software in question and there are many ways to implement it, so this isn’t a way to say a computer is clean, just a way to detect if it’s infected.
Typically, keylogging programs like these are installed as device driver filters. Open devmgmt.msc, locate your keyboard and right click -> properties -> details tab -> property drop down -> upper filters and lower filters.
These should be empty normally. If there are entries present then you have some program that is hooking into your keyboard driver and accessing your keystrokes.
Similarly, there should be a filter on your mouse.
If you are especially paranoid, you can jot down the GUID of the keyboard and mouse driver (it looks like a long hex number with dashes surrounded by {}s), then shut down the computer and boot to a rescue disk, open up regedit, mount the registry hive for SYSTEM it’s located in \windows\system32\config\system, (let’s say you mount it to SYSTEM.remote), then navigate to SYSTEM.remote\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\
Then you scroll through this key’s values and look for UpperFilters and LowerFilters.
The reason why you do it this way is to avoid a rootkit situation, where a driver also hooks into requests to the OS for certain information, and uses that to hide its presence.
Yes, but my point is that you’re asking a flawed question. It’s possible for us to give you a bunch of different services or processes to look for, but it’s trivial for these companies to just make a new service or process with a different name that’s harder to find. You’re trying to play a cat and mouse game that you’re not going to win.
I work in IT. Most of our clients’ computers are managed by an MDM, which means that we can push ANY package or software to the computer at ANY time, without notifying the user. Most of our clients don’t bother with tracking software, but some do. And make no mistake, tracking software is basically legal spyware.
So, my point is this: it doesn’t matter whether or not you have evidence of tracking software on your computer. Just assume that it’s there, and don’t use your computer for anything you don’t want your employer to see. That is the safest route.
EliseYou’d have to disable IME for Intel or the equivalent for AMD and then reinstall the OS.
However you might simply want to run some rootkit detecting tools, check what programs and drivers you have installed and look up each one, and browser extensions.
Rikudou_SageWhat dystopia do you guys live in? I’ve worked for some small companies and some corporates and neither did this shit, that really wouldn’t fly here.
It’s illegal in the EU, so probably not there.
That might be it. The more I learn the happier I am I live in EU.
IndiBronyAs a Brit who appreciated what the EU did for us: this makes me sad 😢
Well, here’s to hoping that you’ll join us one day again :)
10EXPThis is from someone who doesn’t keep up at all: Does the UK plan on it? Are there at least people proposing rejoining?
Nothing serious, but the general consensus online is that it would be the smart thing to do. Note the keyword online. Given that I frequented Reddit and now Lemmy, there’s obviously a bias.
UK people were kinda drunk on their former glory and didn’t quite notice that basically everyone worth considering (US, EU, China) has the upper hand when dealing with them alone. Realistically speaking, they’ll have to join EU (or its successor) eventually. We might be talking 10 years, 20 years, 50 or even 100. If I personally had to guess, it’s gonna be 20 to 40 years.
It’s legal to spy on your employees in USA?
I’m beginning to think all their tinfoil conspiracy theories aren’t completely baseless…
SturgiesYrFaseLand of the Free, my dude!
Yeah, they lack personal freedom in USA, it’s just the way it is. Freedom means it’s ok for your boss to spy on you, they’re free to do that and you are free to be spied on. Oh and they get to own a gun which makes them like really really cool and tough.
Depends what mean by owning a gun but some people are so insecure about their personal safety that they probably want one
1984Why would it be tinfoil? The us culture is very much about hardcore capitalism. They don’t even have unions or proper vacations.
AngrilyEatingMuffinsWe have unions lmao what?!
kurcatoviumWell, our ~800 people company has unions too. But they don’t do sht for people. And I mean real sht. Except for once a year they have a meeting with free sandwiches they eat and then go home. Another year of unions well done… apparently by them.
But my friends working in big technical/industrial corp say their unions are quite strong and they at least care for employees a bit.
So yeah, there’re unions to this day, but their meaning is not met everywhere.
Dark ArcAre you sure your union isn’t helping? No union is going to be run by miracle workers, but that doesn’t mean they don’t improve conditions. I can’t say for sure, but I suspect this sentiment is part of why union membership fell apart in the 20th century “well my union doesn’t do anything for me anyways.”
Like democracy, unions do require some upkeep via people stepping up. If you don’t like how your union is performing, you could consider becoming a rep (admittedly based on my limited understanding as a non-union employee).
Yes, I am pretty sure. I know most people there personally. It’s kind of sad it even exists, pretty much waste of money in this case.
WingedThingNot true on either count. We just don’t have enough unions and only some of us have good vacation.