If your company uses software to monitor you, your personal data may be reaching more companies than you think. A new study has revealed that several workplace monitoring apps, often called bossware, are allegedly sharing employee data with third parties, including Google, Facebook and Microsoft.
The research was led by Stephanie Nguyen, a senior fellow at Columbia Law School’s Center for Law and the Economy and former chief technologist at the US Federal Trade Commission under Lina Khan. The study examined nine employee tracking platforms and found that all of them shared worker-related information with outside companies.
‘The striking piece of this study is that every single platform, nine of nine bossware companies, shared worker data with outside companies. Every single one,’ Nguyen told The Verge. ‘That blew me away.’
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The report reviewed apps including Apploye, Desklog, Hubstaff, Monitask, Buddy Punch, VeriClock, When I Work, Deputy, and Time Doctor. Researchers found that these platforms were sharing data such as employee names, email addresses, company information, IP addresses, browsing activity and websites visited during work.
To investigate, the researchers created trial accounts for both workers and managers and monitored the network traffic generated by the apps. According to the findings, some of the collected information was being sent to platforms connected to advertising and analytics services operated by companies like Google, Meta’s Facebook and Microsoft.
The study also claimed that three of the nine platforms could track workers’ precise locations, even while the apps were running in the background.
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Deputy, one of the companies named in the report, rejected the claims of improper tracking. Ciaran Hale, the company’s CTO, said its ‘third-party relationships are limited to trusted operational and infrastructure providers that support the delivery, security, and reliability of our platform.’
The researchers warned that this type of data collection could eventually create a long-term ‘worker reputation economy,’ where employee behaviour and tracking data may continue to impact workers even after they leave a company.
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