I think a lot of HN is more familiar with office tech jobs than the types of businesses this article is talking about. The companies they linked do things like allowing workers to clock-in remotely from their phones, and then the app uses GPS to record where you clocked in.

> If your bottom line is actually affected by a change in employee performance that needs automated surveillance to be noticed, are you just not running a profitable buisness?

This website is called "Rest Of World" because it focuses on countries outside of places like the US and Canada, where small businesses aren't operating with the fat profit margins of a SaaS company. Employee productivity and timeclock fraud can completely change the nature of a small business running on razor-thin profits in a developing country. It's a completely different ballgame than some software developers scrolling Reddit for a couple hours every day at a SaaS company.

In the world of hourly workers where turnover is high, timeclock fraud will run rampant in a non-trivial portion of your workforce if people realize it's not being monitored closely. The subset of people abusing it also changes over time. Some employees start out operating by the book and then start pushing the limit to see how much they can get away with.

The article doesn't really do the topic justice by blurring the lines between "app that lets workers clock in at remote jobsites" and "AI tool to surveil employees". I think a lot of comments are assuming it's all the latter.