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- New report reveals widespread employee monitoring sensors
- Some students have already successfully resisted them
- These sensors enable “intrusive behavioral monitoring and profiling”
A new study led by Cracked Labs has warned physical office spaces have become hubs of surveillance, where sensors and wireless technology monitor employees’ movements and behaviors to keep track of office use and productive output.
“As offices… become networked environments, there is a growing desire among employers to exploit data gathered from their existing digital infrastructure,” the study notes.
While data collection can serve genuinely useful operational purposes, it can also include personal data about employees, raising privacy concerns.
Offices are being used to track workers
Cracked Labs, together with AlgorithmWatch, Jeremias Prassl (Oxford), UNI Europa and GPA as collaborators, noted how networking companies like Cisco and Juniper, can track individuals’ movements via devices connected to the Wi-Fi.
Such systems can be useful for optimizing office spaces and improving safety, however granular tracking such as monitoring when employees enter and leave a room, desk occupancy patterns and time spent in specific areas could be used to employees’ detriment.
The report also highlights software company Spacewell’s use of under-desk and ceiling-mounted motion sensors, door sensors and AI-based visual sensors, which are intended to provide a live data floorplan but instead pose a significant employee privacy risk.
The consequences have been worker protests and media debates, with some headline examples including the UK’s Daily Telegraph and banking giant Barclays. Additionally, students at Northeastern University successfully resisted the deployment of motion sensors, citing concerns that they were “intimidating” and “unnecessary.”
In summary, Cracked Labs accuses companies that employ such monitoring technologies of “intrusive behavioral monitoring and profiling.” The Austrian nonprofit also states that, by normalizing these types of sensors in everyday environments, it enables them to “creep into other purposes.”
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