1984, 2025/6 Corporate Style

Big Brother is watching you… always.

A question was raised on a post regarding companies monitoring employees with increasingly stealthy and, yes, underhanded methods: ways that had been previously left to the domain of the hacker… the black-hat hacker. So the question posed was:

The question is whether the employer is entitled to monitor working hours, work performance, or both. After all, the employer pays money for work performance.

I think the discussion is twofold. First is the question of whether they should be entitled or allowed to, while the second is that if they are, then how should they should be allowed to do it.

The first question is fairly cut and dry. Yes, they should be able to monitor work. It’s a little more nuanced than that since things have evolved quite a bit since those days when the manager would walk by, knock loudly on the office door, try to be humorous with something like “wakey, wakey!” and leave, while leaving the developer to take 20 or so minutes to refocus on whatever they were working on. I didn’t mind it inasmuch as that was just part and parcel with being in the office, and it was still understood that the real measurement of work and performance was the final product.

I miss being told what I needed to do and then being left the @#$% alone until it was finished… That’s just not where we are now. Remote work doesn’t really allow for that, though the measure is still the same: did you get what you needed by when you needed it?

The second question revolves around things that haven’t existed previously in the breadth and width of scope that they do today. It raises a secondary (tertiary?) question of ethics and legality involved in how that monitoring is done. Spycraft is considered spycraft because it goes around laws and ethical considerations and relies on stealth to acquire the desired information. Having an employer turning to spycraft is kind of a frightening proposition, but when people think about being protected by privacy laws, they often forget that when you work for a private company, most of the laws don’t apply.

Anecdotally, in the mid-2010s, a company I was working for started experimenting with this technology. Growing up in the early-to-mid-80s, I pay a LOT of attention to what’s going on with the innards of my system, and when a temp directory shows up and disappears regularly, it’s a red flag. I set it to “read-only” and was, fairly quickly, told that being smarter than their software was a violation of some company policy that didn’t exist because the technology didn’t exist when the employee handbook was written. I pushed back saying that while it was within their right to do so, it was also within the employee’s rights to know it’s being done.

“I don’t really care you’re doing it, but I do care you didn’t consider it ethical enough to tell me you were doing it.”

For me the bottom line is that while, yes, a company can go all black-ops and snoop and sniff and screen-grab all in the name of making sure their employees aren’t dicking around on company time, not disclosing it tells me that they don’t feel it’s legitimate or ethical to do in the way they’re doing it.

I’ve done my job in IT for over 35 years without having my system monitored, and, weirdly, I got/get my work done. Weirdly, so did/does everyone I worked with who was doing their job. Also weirdly, if there was someone who WAS screwing around on company time, everyone knew it even without keyloggers and screen grabbing.

The bottom line, for me, is that while being salaried means you’re technically on the clock 24/7/365, it doesn’t excuse using unethical/borderline illegal means to snoop on employees. Yes, employers are paying for work performance, but being salaried means you’re going on faith, and the message this sends is that this trust isn’t there. I know that I have a hard time working for a company that doesn’t trust me enough to allow me to do my job unobstructed or unsurveilled.

So, to your point, if getting your employees to work involves spycraft and, by extension, extortion, then you’re not a very well-run company. I guess a lot of employers, these days, don’t remember the lessons of the Cold War: the fear of something happening is more effective, generally, than it actually happening. Telling employees that they’re subject to monitoring is often enough to keep them in line even without actively monitoring.