'The Way My Boss Monitored Me At Home Was Creepy'

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: Electronic monitoring of home workers by companies is rising sharply, a survey suggests. The government is being urged to toughen the rules -- and ban most webcam use. 'It was creepy,' says Chris. 'One of my managers was watching people's personal computers to monitor what we were doing at home -- all the time, not just when we were working. It was a bizarre way to carry on.' When the first lockdown started, the firm that employed Chris -- a 31-year-old engineer from Sheffield -- sent most of its staff home. They were ordered to connect their private laptop and desktop computers to more powerful office machines so they could continue their high-tech operations. 'We didn't mind,' says Chris, 'but I found loads of screens switched on one day when I came in to the office, and everybody's desktops were there, on display. 'One of the managers wasn't just looking at our work. He could see exactly what we were doing all the time -- what we were watching on YouTube, that kind of thing.'

Chris, who changed companies after he found out one of his managers was monitoring his home activities, thinks 'excessive' surveillance is counter-productive. 'My productivity didn't go down when I started working from home,' he says, 'and when I knew what was happening it made me more nervous. A lot of the time in my job is spent designing things on paper, away from the screen, so that doesn't register if someone is simply looking at what's going on on my desktop. It probably looked to that guy like I was downstairs watching Netflix or something, but I wasn't. It's a very blunt, depersonalizing way of trying to ensure people behave in the way a company wants.'

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