This would be the point where I quit and find another job.
Note that while 80% of workers are against such monitoring, nearly half of workers 18-34 are being monitored. This suggests that perhaps just "quit[ting] and find[ing] another job" may not be so easy for these people.
And, no, you won't be able to find an alternative employer that offers remote work and doesn't monitor you.
An employer can also deny that they're monitoring you, and there's nothing you can do about it.
What I was referring to was simply that there is a little color coded status symbol by a person's chat icon, which is green if they are active, and turns yellow if they are not doing much.
However, if you have a meeting or appointment on your calendar, or you are presenting/videoconferencing it goes to red, so you really don't have to be green or yellow any more than you want to.
Oh boy are you wrong.
I think I recall threads on HN about such things existing.
But I'm not aware of how to use them or that my organization is using them.
It wouldn't shock me if they were, but my prior is no more than 50%.
I observe that people around me usually don't use 99.9% or more of Microsoft software features.
But in context, MS Teams has extensive dashboard analytics, some of it promoted under the guise of "employee wellness" but mostly used for command and control and monitoring, and there are several addons that add even more extensive tracking and analytics, e.g. ActivTrak.
[0]https://www.amazon.com/CRU-30200-0100-0011-WiebeTech-Mouse-J...
If you need to keep a log of what applications a user is running and when, or what websites they're visiting, then you have security issues elsewhere. If you solve those issues, then it makes no difference what the worker is doing.
And if they're not doing work when they should, it's not exactly rocket science to figure that out. We've been doing that for hundreds if not thousands of years.
All of those can be collected by talking to me, and few can be automated from the chat and email programs I use for company activities. The tooling they're talking about in this article is a whole other level - surreptitious screenshots and logs of which programs are open. Camera shots without warning.
My boss should know what my work-product is like and what my coworkers and customers think of my performance. They should expect me to be presentable with a moments notice while I'm on the clock, but I can do that while I'm sitting on my couch in my underwear.
Quite frankly, the ability to remotely trigger a camera without warning is a nightmare - for the employers. It's a sexual harassment lawsuit waiting to happen. Someone will time their shots (or simply take one a second and more when they see something salacious), and it will leak. There's no business need for these tools and we should make clear in our reactions no jury would question large judgements in harassment suits for use of this software.
I don’t think monitoring is even remotely the norm, but I can see how it could be. I recall MS Teams has some kind of “productivity” monitor that could definitely be abused and eventually normalized.
The companies I’ve worked remote for can generally tell if you’re slacking off by whether or not you get shit done. No need (or time) for monitoring nonsense.
Is this what you meant by monitoring?
As the police have found, being monitored can actually help in the event of false accusations of misconduct.
Furthermore, if you are monitored and nobody has a problem with your performance, now you have evidence (even if you don't have it, it's discoverable) should they try to change the rules or the enforcement of them.
I really can't count the number of times my manager thinks something is wrong and I have to patiently dig up emails to prove it's not. Furthermore, as long as people don't really hate you for some reason, every time you successfully defend yourself against a false accusation should be some banked goodwill.
I've heard stories about how in olden days subordinates would have to take notes longhand to protect themselves from the bosses rewriting history. Sounds like a lot of work.
People used to take notes to prove their boss wrong when he said "I never said that!" because they weren't under surveillance.
A hopeful example of the value of self-recording: Car dashcams are relevant for insurance claims. Or are they?
I'm a manager at an F50 company and we have no monitoring tools out side of normal security scans of outgoing e-mail content and such. I couldn't even get stats on employees hours at their laptops if I wanted to.
I watch what is produced, if it is good and constant there isn't a problem.
Yes, there are many options for companies to do this but for most it is not worth the investment in time/money/maintenance to let you catch a low performer potentially a bit earlier than just using their output as your yardstick.