Big Brother gets sophisticated

An article in The Guardian, “Big Brother isn’t just watching: workplace surveillance can track your every move”, looks at the latest techniques in the United States for monitoring employees. Monitoring in American workplaces seems to be progressively becoming more and more aggressive, whereas in Europe, the recent Bărbulescu v. Romania ruling of the European Court of Human Rights case states that employees must have a significant expectation of privacy in the workplace.

The Guardian article describes working environments where employees’ communications are constantly and systematically monitored, including instant messaging, social networks, online browsing patterns, and the use of keyboard readers, to name but a few. The image that emerges is of a dysfunctional world that would make East Germany’s Stasi green with envy.

Many companies monitor their employees to the point of connecting their computer cameras every ten minutes, reviewing their communications or using metrics such as the number of emails sent, the number of keys pressed or the hours in front of the screen as indicators of productivity, using as an excuse legal requirements such as the need to control communications in financial companies to avoid cases of insider trading or in other industries in relation to compliance with regulatory requirements.

As always happens with such methods, surveillance designed to prevent illegal activities immediately prompts wrongdoers to find ways to circumvent them, with the result that everybody else finds themselves under the microscope. Surveillance that should be limited to exceptional cases where there are grounds for suspicion, instead becomes a tool for exhaustive control that reduces employees to the level of robots.

The Guardian article examines products provided by companies such as Crossover, InterGuard, Wiretap, Teramind, Digital Reasoning, Qumram, Famaand others that, with the excuse of promoting safer, more secure professional environments are used to generate absolutely unacceptable levels of monitoring that undermine human dignity.

Technology now allows us to do pretty much anything, but do we really need to test it to the limit in these ways? We are clearly seeing the emergence of disturbing trends, which fortunately have been curbed to some extent in the EU, but that will likely emerge again and again in certain business cultures.

If as a manager you think that technology is there generate surveillance environments and total control, you should consult a psychologist. Nothing, compliance, or security risks or productivity justifies submit your employees to such conditions. Regardless of the possibilities technology offers, our working environments must evolve in other ways.

(En español, aquí)