A corruption watchdog's download of 1.4 million documents from a political staffer's phone is unlawful and "an unrestrained fishing expedition", a barrister has argued.
The truth about working from home - and should we work on Friday afternoons?
The controversy over working from home continues to swirl around the nation's workplaces.
Company turned laptops into covert recording devices to monitor WFH
One of the country’s top compliance training companies recorded the conversations of its employees by turning their laptops into covert listening devices while they were at home, in a case that tests the boundaries of workers’ privacy.
Victorian police are investigating claims that Safetrac breached the state surveillance laws after chief executive Deborah Coram admitted in legal documents that her company recorded the audio and screens of select members of its staff, who work from home.
Workplace surveillance has become a top issue for unions following the rise of artificial intelligence. Bethany Rae
The recordings, which were done over two months, used the laptop’s microphone to capture audio by default. They picked up not only audio from remote Teams meetings but also any sound close to the laptop.
Safetrac says the screen and audio surveillance were necessary to manage underperformers in the business. The company says employees consented to being recorded when they signed their contract and accepted its surveillance policy.
That policy, which consisted of just four sentences when the software was installed, said audio could be recorded during the course of employment.
Several current and former employees have told The Australian Financial Review they did not agree to their laptops’ microphones being secretly switched on for up to 10 hours a day, recording every conversation. This included staff complaining about the CEO during Teams meetings.
They also fear the audio recordings captured not only conversations with colleagues but also discussions with clients that might have involved confidential information, and even family members’ or personal phone calls near the laptop.
Two employees who first discovered the extent of the surveillance were locked out of the company’s systems in June without notice or reason, just four days after they formally accused it of invasion of privacy.
Within weeks, they were sacked. They have since lodged unlawful dismissal claims against Safetrac and filed complaints over the surveillance with police, work health and safety authorities and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.
Safetrac is one of the biggest compliance training companies in the country. Its clients include David Jones, Wesfarmers, Metcash, Toyota, Aon, Bank of China, Vanguard, Acciona, Air NZ and Football Victoria.
Workplace surveillance has become a priority issue for unions following the rise of artificial intelligence, and as working from home blurs the boundaries between professional and personal life.
The unions pushed for stronger safeguards against technologies that track worker productivity in the run-up to the Albanese government’s Economic Reform Roundtable last week.
In NSW this month, the Minns government proposed a new duty of care on companies to prevent excessive or unreasonable monitoring of workers. In Victoria, a recent Labor-chaired parliamentary inquiry recommended urgent reforms to deal with employee monitoring in remote workplaces.
Some of the recordings picked up staff complaining about Safetrac CEO Deborah Coram. Arsineh Houspian
For Safetrac, the issue threatens to blow up in several jurisdictions, given that its 70 employees work across the country and are covered by different state surveillance laws.
This month, Victoria’s WorkCover granted a Safetrac staff member weekly workers’ compensation payments after accepting that the company’s surveillance had led to anxiety and depression.
A Victoria Police spokesman also confirmed that police “received a report on July 23 in relation to possible misuse of surveillance”. “Police are investigating if any criminal offences have occurred,” he said.
Dudley Kneller, a technology and privacy partner at law firm Gadens, said Victorian surveillance law had a “blanket prohibition around surveillance unless you’ve got the consent of the parties to the conversation”.
“Employers would need to be specific about how they’re deploying surveillance,” he said.
University of Technology Sydney workplace law professor Joellen Riley-Munton said surveillance laws had not caught up with increasing technological capabilities and the rapid rise of work from home.
“Now that our homes are our work spaces, we have this problem that our employer has a legitimate interest in knowing you’re doing the work they’re paying for but the problem is the work is being done is in spaces shared with other family members and there is, in fact, this leakage between what is your genuine private life and work,” she said.
“The problem of defining what the proper boundaries are is going to have to be resolved.”
Not a ‘big brother’ solution
Safetrac was originally launched in 1999 as a subsidiary of top law firm MinterEllison to provide online legal, policy, risk management and behavioural compliance training.
Coram was previously a technology lawyer at Minter Ellison. She was appointed as CEO of Safetrac in 2011 and is now its major shareholder, after purchasing the company from the law firm.
From the end of 2024, company sources said Coram started complaining to executives about her remote workforce’s underperformance. In meetings, she said some staff needed to have a “come-to-God” moment.
In mid-April, and unknown to the Safetrac employees who spoke to the Financial Review, the company installed and deployed a US-based employee-monitoring software known as Teramind.
Teramind’s website says the software is not a “big brother” solution, but claims it is the “most robust remote desktop recording platform in the world”. Its features include capturing audio from all input and output devices on remote desktops, including microphones.
From April 15 and for at least the next six weeks, the software recorded the desktop screens of select Safetrac workers, including their online Teams meetings, as well as audio from their microphones to pick up voices within a few feet from the laptop.
The surveillance did not record all employees as the company’s licence with Teramind allowed it to monitor only up to 10 employees at a time, sources familiar with the matter said. But staff would not know if they were the ones recorded.
Deborah Coram delivered a webinar on changes to the Privacy Act.
While Coram discussed surveillance at senior staff meetings as a way of monitoring performance, managers alleged that it was only at the end of May when they realised this included the sound and screen recordings of employees.
Sources familiar with the matter told the Financial Review that around May 30, two senior staff members became aware of what was going on when Coram told them she had been “up all night” watching videos of Teams meetings, including those in which staff had spoken negatively about a colleague.
Some recordings she referred to dated back to mid-April. Sources said Coram told them that after watching the Teams meetings, she suspected some employees had been lying to her.
In the days after the discovery, sources said that the IT manager told the management the company had been recording sound from select employees’ laptop microphones by default, and the recordings had taken place from 8am to 6pm.
Staff who were subsequently told about the recordings said they took to placing their laptops in the closet or went out on the street to use their phones. One employee’s children started whispering when near them to ensure their voices would not get picked up. Employees said they developed anxiety that they were still secretly under surveillance.
Safetrac would later say that it had turned off the visual and audio capturing by June 2, according to a legal letter sent to one employee.
But on June 5, when a senior manager asked Coram if she had any more recordings of the team that they could listen to, she replied, “I do, but I don’t think it’s helpful.”
Later that day, Coram delivered a compliance webinar on the Commonwealth’s new tort for serious invasions of privacy, which came into effect on June 10.
The webinar outlined potential civil and criminal penalties of up to $50 million, or 30 per cent of annual turnover, for serious repeated privacy breaches and advised businesses to do regular internal audits on their compliance and data governance.
“And that’s probably an area you may want to get advice on if you’re not sure what it looks like when you’re looking at it personally,” Coram said.
Workers’ compensation claims lodged
By June 18, two employees had engaged lawyers who wrote to Safetrac’s second-biggest shareholder, expressing concerns that the company might have committed privacy breaches. They lodged workers’ compensation claims.
Just two days later, the company locked them out of the system. They say they were not advised about the reasons for the lockout. About a month later, both had been sacked.
The company said one was sacked because of underperformance and the other because of a text message sent to a co-worker, saying Safetrac was “the wild west” and that they would hold it to account by going to the media. Safetrac claimed the text posed a serious risk to its reputation and commercial viability and caused significant distress to the recipient.
In its termination letter to one of the employees on July 10, Safetrac, represented by law firm People + Culture Strategies, acknowledged that from about April 15 to 22, it had “downloaded and deployed Teramind into Safetrac’s system and onto Safetrac-issued devices”.
“Ms Coram is the only person who has listened to the audio recordings that were captured,” the letter said.
“The Teramind audio and visual data capturing function was turned off by June 2, 2025.”
The company defended its use in the letter by saying the executive leadership team had discussed deploying the software in meetings from January to May.
Safetrac did not give a date for its decision to deploy Teramind, but it said all staff were notified at a company-wide town hall meeting on February 6 that “additional employee computer monitoring and surveillance” was going to be introduced.
Several managers present at a meeting in April, during which the use of surveillance for underperformance was discussed, said they did not recall any mention of Teramind or audio recordings. They said they had assumed the surveillance meant keyboard or browser tracking.
The staff town hall mentioned surveillance only briefly and with little detail, sources present at the meeting said.
Safetrac’s lawyers argued in the termination letter that when employees signed their contract, they consented to monitoring and surveillance during their employment. This included surveillance that “may capture images and sound” as spelt out in its surveillance policy.
A copy of that policy, as of April, seen by the Financial Review, said employees’ computer and phone use “will be subject to continuous monitoring through use of hardware and software”.
“Safetrac may use, install and maintain surveillance devices that may capture images and sound of employees in the course of their employment.”
‘Legitimate business purpose’
Safetrac acknowledged in a termination letter that it had “turned on” Teramind for an employee and collected information for “a legitimate business purpose”, namely performance management.
After reviewing data that showed the employee was idle on their laptop about half the day, Safetrac said it “accessed work conversations involving [the employee] which were captured on [their] company-issued device during work hours and the review of these conversations reinforced Safetrac’s view regarding [the employee’s] limited productivity”.
It said it understood the Teramind recordings were on an automatic deletion cycle and the company was inquiring whether Teramind itself preserved recordings.
“Safetrac remains confident that its practices were entirely lawful, appropriate, and justified,” its letter said. “Nevertheless, it remains open to engaging with relevant authorities and to adopting any recommendations that further strengthen its already robust compliance framework.”
By the end of June, the tracked changes in policy seen by the Financial Review showed Coram was significantly altering Safetrac’s surveillance practice. This included a raft of new details that named Teramind as the provider, and explained how it worked and what was monitored. The surveillance window was specified as from 9am to 5pm.
The company is set to attend mediation in the Fair Work Commission next week over allegations that it unlawfully dismissed the employee for exercising their workplace rights to complain about the surveillance.
