The Dark Side of WFH

You have good reason to be paranoid.

If you normally work in an office, chances are you currently WFH (work from home). This has been the standard since mid-March for all the reasons we’re all too familiar with.

For many employees, this change was accompanied by a new sense of freedom. No longer can the boss look over your shoulder to see what’s on your monitor. Now you can take 20 minutes to check TikTok and no one will be the wiser. Right?

Not so fast. Employee monitoring software is a growth industry, with numerous choices for businesses small and large. Now it’s not just a matter of your boss peeking over your shoulder; the software casts its unblinking eye on everything you do from the time you log in to when you shut down for the day.

Every website, keystroke, spreadsheet, email, and break in activity can be monitored, collated, and warehoused for future use. Your next evaluation will likely include metrics of your time on Facebook, your breaks in activity, and your addiction to The Witcher.

To be clear, tracking software was available pre-pandemic, but most businesses were comfortable with MBWA* when we were all still in office cubicles. Now that we aren’t in physical proximity to the boss, the electronic leash has grown substantially, complete with AI and machine learning.

The scary part is that most folks know this but don’t really think about it. We all know that our company phones aren’t really ours. We keep pictures on them and login to Facebook anyway. We send (sometimes inappropriate) texts to our kids and SOs. Now the same is happening with our laptops, no matter where we are.

Do you have a personal email you use to communicate with others, maybe even to look for another job? That’s being tracked as well if you’re accessing it on your company device. Or even if it’s your personal device but it has company software access.

Years ago trucking companies installed GPS tracking units on vehicles to track driver behavior. That’s pretty common today, but here is a real-life scenario.

A truck driver was in a crash caused by a motorist who ran a red light while he was on the job. The other driver ran the light, so it’s not the trucker’s fault, right? Except the company looked at the entire trip. At one point 15 minutes earlier he had exceeded the speed limit by 5 m.p.h. for about 5 minutes. The company blamed the truck driver because — get — if he had obeyed the posted speed limit he would not have been at that intersection at that time. True story.

Think about all the things you do on your company PC in an average day. Think about what that might look like later in a forensic analysis of your behavior.

Welcome to the dark side. You will be assimilated.

*Management By Walking Around