Software to monitor employees working at home in demand during pandemic, experts say
As the coronavirus forces people to work from home, companies are increasingly seeking computer software to track their employees, experts say.
Technology businesses are seeing a rise in demand for programs that monitor workers’ digital habits, representatives told NPR and Recode.
“Are they generally active on programs and websites that I would consider productive like Excel, PowerPoint, Word, email, as opposed to YouTube or Facebook?” Brad Miller of Awareness Technologies told NPR. “That’s primarily what our customers are looking to know.”
Employers are requesting the software when some have revised work-from-home policies to reduce the risk of spreading COVID-19. With employees out of sight, it could make it harder for managers to track productivity, experts told multiple news outlets.
“Since this thing started, the coronavirus pandemic, 16 percent of companies ordered this kind of software because they’d like to monitor their employees,” Ahmed Banafa, a professor at San Jose State University, told KGO. “Companies on the other side, who provide these kind of services, they saw (a) 40 percent increase from their current customers asking for more licenses.”
Not everyone is on board with the possibility of surveillance on the job.
Jim Guilkey calls these potential measures a “’Big Brother’ approach,” according to a news release.
“It is very demotivating for employees,” Guilkey, president of the training company S4 NetQuest, said Wednesday in the release. “There are a number of ways to determine productivity, but not like this.”
The American Civil Liberties Union, which has long worked on privacy-related cases, said technology could help stop the spread of COVID-19. But the organization warned the pandemic shouldn’t expose people to more “commercial data collection.”
“As we rapidly shift to online learning and working, we’re calling for strict privacy safeguards to protect our nation’s children, teachers, and workers from invasive data collection practices,” the ACLU wrote on its website.
This story was originally published May 13, 2020 at 12:57 PM with the headline "Software to monitor employees working at home in demand during pandemic, experts say."
