The Wretched Trend of Employee-Monitoring Spyware
Keystrokes and mouse-jiggles aren’t “productivity”
I’ve written a bunch lately about how employee monitoring technology makes workers utterly miserable.
You’ve got truckers working in rolling panopticons — the vehicles bristling with sensors that spy on everything up to the driver’s head-pose, and report it to their employee. You’ve got gig employees jerked around by algorithms. And you’ve got companies asking customers to rate employees, then using those erratic, meaningless ratings to ding workers.
Now the New York Times has an excellent report on a nauseating and growing trend: Companies using spyware to check mouse-clicks and keyboard-movement so they can judge a “worker productivity score”.
Stop clicking on your keyboard? Stop using your mouse, or posting in the online forums?
You’re slacking!
Or as Jodi Kantor and the team that produced that Times piece put it: “Since the dawn of modern offices, workers have orchestrated their actions by watching the clock. Now, more and more, the clock is watching them.”
It’s loathsome, of course. But it’s loathsome in a way that’s quite revealing about the collision of technology and labor these days.
