If I were to tell you your boss was reading your emails,
monitoring your browser,
tracking your movements during the work day, you might swiftly close some tabs
but you probably wouldn't be that surprised. Apparently more than half of us think that
we're being watched at work we are, and we always happen.
People talk about workplace surveillance
as if it's something out of a Philip K. Dick novel.
Workplace surveillance has a long history. In America black studies professor Simone Brown
traces the relationship to slavery, plantation overseers, slave patrols,
New York City lantern laws that required slaves to carry candles with them after dark.
Meanwhile, in Britain, the transition from workshop
to factory production during the Industrial Revolution
was enabling bosses to surveil workers way more easily using things like punch cards
and panoptic architecture.
By the 20th century, the French philosopher Michel Foucault
had come to the conclusion that surveillance was symptomatic,
not just to the modern workplace, but of modernity itself.
Then why do things seem to have got so much worse this past year?
It can't just be that we're all stuck at home doomscrolling.
It might be to do with the fact that we're all stuck at home though,
before the pandemic, the main way employers assuaged their anxiety
about what workers got up to was presenteeism, gently nudging or contractually obliging us
to be physically present with them in the office.
The sneaking suspicion of bosses everywhere is that when we work from home,
what we're really doing is sitting in bed watching Netflix.
And to be fair, we probably are doing some of that.
But the thing is, we're still more productive. In a recent survey by the University of Essex
workers reported being just as industrious at home
as at the office, even with all the pressures of the pandemic.
But that doesn't stop bosses treating remote workers with suspicion,
suspicion they satisfy with intensified surveillance.
A few months ago, you could dial into a meeting or turn off your Slack notifications, no problem.
But now you're suddenly being sent pass-agg messages
if you're off Slack for more than a few minutes,
or being made to turn on your camera during a Zoom call.
At the techier end there’s software called things like Sneak,
Clever control, Spyagent and Staff Cop offering things
like ‘invisible installation’ and ‘silent screenshots’,
software that sells itself on covertness, and is way more prevalent than you might think.
Worker surveillance, employee surveillance,
employee monitoring, spying, whatever you want to call it.
We've seen a massive increase during the course of the pandemic.
The latest data shows that long term surveillance tools
are seeing an increase of about 51%. But it's also become more covert employees
don't really know their rights around surveillance.
That's a big barrier to making sure that the worker employee contract works well.
That isn't to say there hasn't been resistance to surveillance until now.
Enter sousveillance. Sousveillance coined by the Canadian engineer Steve Mann
in the early 2000s refers to the act of identifying and counteracting surveillance.
It's what Simone Brown calls ‘citizen undersight’. A means of watching the watchers,
either to hold them to account or simply to escape their control.
There are ways to get around that your employees will just install fake
webcam software, or they can write
macros to imitate typing or mouse or they can spoof their location.
So it's a it's an ongoing war of attrition, which benefits nobody.
Sousveillance is great, but probably not a long term solution.
What we need is for employers to do the right thing,
or rather be made to do the right thing.
Workers already have quite a few protections
under the Data Protection Act 2018 in the UK, so firstly, the contents of that Act,
which is based off GDPR because it is the British implementation of GDPR
gives workers certain rights so you can demand to your employer,
for example, what data they have, and why they need it.
They have to show that it's proportional and necessary.
Employers have been pretty cavalier in their approach to GDPR.
In fact, many are flagrantly breaching it, unions have made some positive
noises about surveillance, but they haven't made much of
a concerted effort to empower workers to
defend their rights on surveillance, or to force bosses to fulfil their obligations.
UTAW or United Tech and Allied Workers hopes to change that.
So UTAW United Tech and Allied Workers represent a lot of software engineers,
we have people who are very, very aware of these things.
There's a lot going on nowadays with community organisation,
especially tech savvy bodies such as UTAW, Then the question naturally turns to what
protections we have what legal rights do we have
that we can force them to stop some of this.
On the legal aspect, there is the matter of keeping track
of what the government is doing with regards to the Data Protection Act,
and looking at ways where if we identify a need for workers to have further protection,
we need to lobby parliament to change that make those changes.
Look, I don't think surveillance even the more technical kind is bad in itself.
No technology is. The problem is when
surveillance is excessive, punitive and opaque. Many employers are actively deceiving their
employees, but many
more are just relying on our ignorance, apathy and fear to commit daylight robbery of our data.
What's was this situation doesn't even really help bosses.
It erodes trust, wrecks productivity, and is a massive waste of money.
It's time workers told them. Leave us alone, you weirdos.