Is your company secretly monitoring your work at home? Since COVID, the practice has surged

Gartner, a technology research and consulting firm, estimates that 60% of large corporations now employ monitoring software, double the share of early last year. But Brian Kropp, Gartner’s chief of human resource research who has been surveying companies, said that “most employers have not told their employees they’re doing this, which actually creates a real problem.” ExpressVPN, in a recent study with Pollfish, found that 1 in 5 employers aren’t likely to tell employees about installing monitoring software. “But I can see how if you’re not as technically inclined or maybe you don’t have an extra computer at home that you could use for personal stuff, you’re just kind of subject to the whims of your employer.” Patrick Piper, director of business affairs at Floyd County Productions, said the company “does not perform any micro-monitoring of day-to-day employee activity.” Nor does it secretly grab screenshots from employees, he said in an email reply. “Floyd County Productions does perform ‘activity monitoring’ in the professional sense of protecting our networks, the intellectual property of our clients and overall progress of our productions,” Piper said. “The company realized that their employees are going to be really upset once they find out that you’ve been tracking them in all these sorts of things while they’ve been working at home,” Kropp said.