A look at the rising use of surveillance technologies by companies to monitor their employees in the workplace
Ellen Sheng / CNBC : Tweets: @cal_cpa , @joejerome , @sundeep , @jeffreyvc , and @prianka2808 Tweets: CalCpa / @cal_cpa : Some companies track data about employees' movement, computer use, and email and calendar information, research shows. Companies argue this data can enhance productivity, but employees worry about privacy. https://cnb.cx/2VO5v6H pic.twitter.com/F5n7aQEd50 Joseph Jerome / @joejerome : Accurate take from @EFF: “Employees are in a difficult position. As more and more consumer privacy laws take shape, we've seen that there's been a concern from companies that those privacy laws don't apply to employees.” https://www.cnbc.com/... Sunny Madra / @sundeep : wtf @Microsoft “Microsoft's Workplace Analytics lets employers monitor data such as time spent on email, meeting time or time spent working after hours.” https://www.cnbc.com/... Jeffrey Van Camp / @jeffreyvc : I'd comment on this, but I dont want to appear unproductive. https://cnb.cx/2KAnoEO Prianka Srinivasan / @prianka2808 : 22% of organizations worldwide in various industries are using employee-movement data, 17% are monitoring work-computer-usage data, and 16% are using Microsoft Outlook- or calendar-usage data. The beginning of the end for #privacy? https://www.cnbc.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2019 CNBC report sits mid-arc in a documented escalation of employer monitoring. It followed earlier reporting on how firms already tracked staff web-browsing, keystrokes, and private messaging as far back as 2017, and it captured the moment surveillance moved from IT security into productivity analytics — with Microsoft's Workplace Analytics letting employers measure email time, meeting load, and after-hours work.
What makes the piece worth revisiting is how precisely the later record validated its warning. EFF's point here — that consumer privacy laws rarely cover employees, leaving a regulatory gap — frames everything that came next: Walmart and others piloting StrongArm wearable monitors in warehouses for warehouse safety, pandemic-era tracking tools going mainstream after COVID accelerated worker-tracking tech, and by late 2021 contract lawyers describing facial-recognition-based remote-work surveillance as widespread in their industry per US contract lawyers.
First-order effects
- Employers gain granular visibility into movement, computer use, and email/calendar activity — Microsoft's Workplace Analytics turns routine collaboration metadata into management metrics, affecting employees' day-to-day sense of autonomy at work.
Second-order effects
- Surveillance vendors get a durable market: InterGuard and Hubstaff saw sales rise when skeptical employers extended monitoring to remote workers, and EFF's identified legal gap means vendors face little regulatory friction selling into it.
Third-order effects
- If consumer privacy law keeps excluding employees, workplace monitoring normalizes across white-collar and warehouse settings alike — pushing the burden onto employers' own policies and, eventually, onto lawmakers asked to close the gap EFF flagged.
The trend: Employee monitoring is evolving from targeted security tooling into always-on productivity infrastructure, advancing faster than the privacy laws that govern consumers but not workers.