Some are obvious. Even bosses with little tech savvy can get a snapshot of your day by tracking your use of programs like Zoom, Slack, Google Workspace and Microsoft Office, plus logins to corporate terminals.
Ifeoma Ajunwa, an associate professor at UNC School of Law and author of the upcoming The Quantified Worker: Law and Technology in the Modern Workplace , discusses this growing workplace surveillance. Her responses were condensed and edited.They can’t. They could ask directly, and the employer could decide to share, but there is no sure way to know, because there’s no federal law that requires your employer to tell you. It does depend on the state.
If surveillance is so common, how come we rarely see workers fired because they went to Krispy Kreme? People are definitely getting fired, but you may not read about it because people sign something called a Notice of Consequence, where the employer says,"Oh, you will be surveilled” without necessarily telling exactly how. It is used as the premise for firing.There was a case in California about a female junior executive who had been obligated to download an app that tracks your location.