If you sit in front of a computer all day, you might not give a second thought to checking your personal email or taking care of some digital errands. What about taking calls from friends or family at the office? Surfing the web on your phone?
You’d better think twice. Chances are during working hours, all of your activities — personal or not — are being monitored. Someone might even be watching. “Hidden” cameras are just about everywhere, after all.
Big tech companies are watching, too. Facebook is serving you location-based ads, even after you opt out of location tracking.
Any activities performed on company-owned equipment, such as a computer, are fair game. These are some of the things your employer can track or access with the right technology:
- Content on your screen or files stored on disk drives
- The amount of time you spend on and off your computer
- How many keystrokes entered during a specific period
- Your browsing history
As with hardware, any use of company-owned or licensed software opens the door for tracking. Whether it be email or instant messaging for personal or work reasons, your employer is allowed to review your communications.
Some business email systems automatically copy and create backups of all messages that pass through. With the use of specialized software, referred to as a keylogger, your employer could save copies of email drafts you never even sent. In this case, deleting your emails is futile.
Do you drive a corporate car occasionally or regularly for work-related travel? If you do, take note.
Many companies utilize GPS to track an employee’s whereabouts in a company-owned vehicle. Gathered information includes:
- Mileage
- Route
- Driving behavior, including speed
- Time spent in and out of the vehicle
Employee location tracking isn’t exclusive to cars. If your employer provides you with a smartphone, tablet or laptop, you can expect the company to have some monitoring or tracking system installed.
Be warned: The device may continue sending your location long after your work shift ends.
If you’re using a work Apple iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, your company can set up supervision settings.
Supervision allows the administrator to apply additional restrictions such as preventing access to the App Store, filtering web usage or disabling AirDrop.
If you’re active on social media, assume your employer pays attention to your posts, likes and tweets.
Be sensible about what you share online and check your company’s social media guidelines.
Whether we like it or not, we’re waiving our right to privacy when we do anything online. Everything we do is monitored and recorded. And that data is both leveraged and sold. There is no such thing as privacy online. When you are on your employer’s dime you are on your employer’s time. The amount of work loss and productivity stoppages from people “playing” instead of working is mind boggling. And it’s getting worse and worse with every generation.