Just look at the output. Nothing more. Does the employee provide value at the end of the day or not. That's important. Not hours or anything else.
Not to the bean counters. If they can get a good job out of you while distracted 25% of the time they think they could get 25% more out of you for no extra cost if they beat that distraction out of you.
It is one of those double standards many companies have: if you are needed to work extra “you are salaried, not paid by the hour, a bit of flexibility is normal and expected” but if you don't do 37.5 hours one week or are seen to be relaxing too much “your contract clearly says that you are paid to be actively on the job for X time, no less”. Luckily our current regime is far more sensible about this sort of thing, considerate even, though before that buy-out this sort of issue was on the list of reasons I was days away from walking out & burning a few bridges along the way.
To be honest you should immediately exploit that for your own career. Office surveillance exploiters wouldn't hold back as well. Tell them you want set goals and no surveillance, make your employment conditional to that. If that doesn't work go to the next higher instance. If it is only the CEO or owner and he supports it, change the company. Otherwise make an offer to replace the manager or being elevated to the same position with defined goals. Often just a little resistance is enough.
The need to control is greater than...
I don't know. I lack that need, instead needing people to be great people more, and they can't be great when the environment they work in snuffs out greatness.
Would you worry what would happen to you and the company if one of your reports introduced a serious bug or security flaw into the software?
(note: I think these concerns can -- and should -- be addressed in other ways that don't require intrusion into employees' day-to-day activities, but I raise them because I think they're part of the reason (along with compliance, perhaps in some cases?) why these systems are introduced in the first place)
Problem is, they are still proxies. Proxies are great at satisfying feelings, but proxies are by no means a guarantee they will reflect what they try to capture. There are no end of examples of perverse incentives showcasing how a metric can "feel" great, but end up being a big bag of nothing if not detrimental.
Other than that, even thinking along the terms of "well they must have a reason" is a great way of introducing slippery slopes all the way to extremism. I'd have a hard time arguing any answer would justify becoming more and more extremist and trying to deny people privacy and autonomy to such a degree.
It's possible I misunderstand what you're saying here, but I think I agree; I wasn't intending to justify managerial surveillance, only to understand and elaborate why it might be happening.
Without understanding the cause(s), the tendency of organizations will, I'd guess, instead be to patch over any problems that arise -- the process equivalent of adding warning signs instead of fixing a dangerous bridge.
The solution in an effective employment marketplace is to build organizations that avoid the root causes entirely and thus attract (effective, motivated) employees and build desire in others to work at similar workplaces -- while perhaps reducing organizational running costs at the same time as a side-effect.
Why especially then?
Because some office workers think they are special in regards to their output being more creative and cognitive rather than physical and therefore should not be measured in the same fashion as the number of widgets per hour made by a factory worker or tiles per hour laid by a handyman for example, even though ironically, modern SW tools like Jira and processes like Agile & Scrum attempt to do just that, turn cognitive work into factory style repetitive assembling/plumbing work. Which most of it is :) B.R.B, gotta wrap up those story points for the end of the sprint. /s, but only barely
And yeah, commoditization of factory workers is a large problem too, and the commoditization of the skilled professions (WTF, a real oxymoron) is a "what the hell are you even thinking?" situation.