“I think a lot of those products and services are still in a nascent form where there’s not particularly widespread adoption, and surveillance is being used for the purposes of ensuring things like productivity.” An example of this could be speed and location data of a delivery vehicle for safety monitoring and real-time package tracking. “I think there’s a lot of misperception out there about the degree to which the employer is surveilling employees and their activities,” Sussman adds. “Ethically, they really shouldn’t be, and most employers know that.” ![]() “Generally speaking, they’re not monitoring your data as it goes out through Google,” Heimes says. “They’re probably not going to make a big point of it: ‘Hey, we’re tracking you!’ But probably somewhere in your contract, you’ve agreed that they’re going to track you, and they are.” “If you get dumped with a bunch of paperwork when you start the job, you may not notice,” she says. However, employees may unknowingly consent to surveillance when they sign their onboarding paperwork, according to Bartow. “To the extent that the conduct of an employer is unfair or is deceptive, then it’s potentially subject to scrutiny and review by the FTC,” she adds. “Typically what we’re defaulting back to are specific laws applying to employee privacy or a general consumer-protection law,” Sussman says, explaining that most states’ consumer-protection laws read similarly to Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act prohibiting unfair or deceptive acts or practices. ![]() ![]() It’s not illegal for employers to start monitoring their employees in real time if the employees consent (though in some states, employers do not need that consent). Software like Hubstaff-which takes screenshots of worker’s screens and shares phone location data with managers ( with the employee’s knowledge)-rose in popularity, according to The New York Times. At the end of the newspaper’s own three-week experiment, tech correspondent Adam Satariano and his editor Pui-Wing Tam decided it was “overly intrusive.” When the pandemic started, employers hunted for new ways to make sure employees were doing their work.
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