A look at how COVID-19 has accelerated development of tech that tracks workers, and how physically tracing employees could be mainstream even after the pandemic
A boom in contact tracing devices could herald a new era of worker surveillance — Before April, Radiant RFID … Tweets: @davegershgorn , @sarahnemerson , @bcmerchant , @davegershgorn , and @medium Tweets: Dave Gershgorn / @davegershgorn : My latest on tech tracking workers during the pandemic, what the privacy protections look like, and how the tech might stick around. https://twitter.com/... Sarah Emerson / @sarahnemerson : We pretty much stopped talking about the mission creep of coronavirus response technology because of *gestures at everything*, but here's @davegershgorn reporting on how contact tracing devices are already being used to surveil workers across the country https://onezero.medium.com/... Brian Merchant / @bcmerchant : Surprise, contact tracing devices a lot of employees are asked to wear as they return to the office are heralding a new boom in worker surveillance https://onezero.medium.com/... Dave Gershgorn / @davegershgorn : There's an entire industry dedicated to tracking the location of expensive machinery around factory floors and hospitals. It's now making contact tracing wearables for workers. Read all about it here: https://onezero.medium.com/... @medium : If you eventually return to an office, you may be asked to install a special app or even wear a smartwatch that monitors your movements and interactions with your colleagues. https://read.medium.com/iE5ZRU0
Context & Ripple Effects
Workplace monitoring was already rising before the pandemic — a 2019 survey of corporate surveillance tech documented companies tracking employees on the job. COVID-19 then gave that infrastructure an urgent new justification: as US startups and firms like PwC built contact tracing apps to track staff in reopened facilities, vendors like Radiant RFID pivoted from tracking machinery to producing tracing wearables for workers.
The article's core question is mission creep: whether tools adopted under emergency conditions — from employer wearables to state-run apps like India's 75M-download tracing app — get retired with the virus or normalized as permanent workplace and civic infrastructure.
First-order effects
- Employers reopening offices can now require staff to install apps or wear smartwatches that log movements and interactions, making proximity data a condition of returning to work.
- Vendors that previously tracked machinery, like Radiant RFID, gain a new revenue line selling contact tracing hardware to companies managing reopened facilities.
Second-order effects
- Privacy advocates face a harder fight: surveillance framed as pandemic safety is difficult to challenge without appearing to oppose public health, echoing concerns raised over smartphone tracing apps' security and effectiveness.
- Competing tracing ecosystems — Apple's proximity-event standards, employer-built apps, national apps — fragment worker location data across platforms no single regulator oversees.
Third-order effects
- If emergency-era tools persist post-pandemic, the pattern points toward physical employee tracking becoming standard workplace practice rather than an exceptional measure, extending the pre-COVID surveillance trajectory.
- The precedent set by state apps outliving their health purpose suggests governments may retain tracing infrastructure for uses beyond epidemiology, a concern privacy advocates have already raised about India's system.
The trend: Emergency pandemic tooling is converting into permanent monitoring infrastructure, with workplace surveillance the most likely first beneficiary of the normalization.