Cellphone monitoring is spreading with the coronavirus

Cellphone monitoring is spreading with the coronavirus

Washington Post via MSN – So is an uneasy tolerance of surveillance. “To the feelings of fear, restlessness, insecurity and sorrow taking hold around the globe, the pandemic era has added another certainty: being watched. In a matter of months, tens of millions of people in dozens of countries have been placed under surveillance. Governments, private companies and researchers observe the health, habits and movements of citizens, often without their consent. It is a massive effort, aimed at enforcing quarantine rules or tracing the spread of the coronavirus, that has sprung up pell-mell in country after country. “This is a Manhattan Project-level problem that is being addressed by people all over the place,” said John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, a research center at the University of Toronto…”

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Washington Post – Managers turn to surveillance software, always-on webcams to ensure employees are (really) working from home – “Always-on webcams, virtual “water coolers,” constant monitoring: Is the tech industry’s new dream for remote work actually a nightmare?…In the weeks since social distancing lockdowns abruptly scattered the American workforce, businesses across the country have scrambled to find ways to keep their employees in line, packing their social calendars and tracking their productivity to ensure they’re telling the truth about working from home. Thousands of companies now use monitoring software to record employees’ Web browsing and active work hours, dispatching the kinds of tools built for corporate offices into workers’ phones, computers and homes. But they have also sought to watch over the workers themselves, mandating always-on webcam rules, scheduling thrice-daily check-ins and inundating workers with not-so-optional company happy hours, game nights and lunchtime chats…


The New York Times – As we shelter in place in the pandemic, more employers are using software to track our work — and us: “…With millions of us working from home in the coronavirus pandemic, companies are hunting for ways to ensure that we are doing what we are supposed to. Demand has surged for software that can monitor employees, with programs tracking the words we type, snapping pictures with our computer cameras and giving our managers rankings of who is spending too much time on Facebook and not enough on Excel. The technology raises thorny privacy questions about where employers draw the line between maintaining productivity from a homebound work force and creepy surveillance…”