Your boss is spying on you with this secret software

They can track your mouse movements, your applications and they even have access to your webcam.

They can track your mouse movements, your applications and they even have access to your webcam.

More Australian staff are being sacked based on computer surveillance software their bosses have secretly installed in their computers, as distrust between employees and employers grows in a post-pandemic WFH world.

“Bossware” can track minute movements of an employee throughout the work day, including whether they are using the keypad, what applications they have open, and can even use the employee's webcam to record them. And companies don't need the employee's consent to use it.

The phenomenon exploded early in the pandemic when workers went remote almost overnight, and bosses didn't know whether they could trust them. Now, as the “quiet quitting” phenomenon rises and employers become suspicious over whether their workers are running side hustles during work hours, the take-up of these programs is ramping up.

Chandrakumar Sivasubramaniam, co-founder and CEO of FlowTrack-Productivity Monitoring based in Melbourne, has sold his software to about 160 Australian companies, including recruitment agencies, law firms and accounting companies. Sivasubramaniam estimates around 30% of all white-collar businesses in Australia are using monitoring technology which helps determine who to fire and who to promote. They also used the data to discover if employees were more productive working from home or from the office.

“Mouse jigglers” - which move the mouse to keep it active - were one of the hacks that went viral during the pandemic to fool the bossware. But the software is becoming now accounts for these “loopholes”.

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Sivasubramaniam explained that if an employee moves their mouse for 30 seconds but doesn’t click anything and is sitting in the same application, their employee would get an alert. The boss can then check screenshots and recordings to confirm this behaviour and if it becomes a pattern, approach the employee.

“You can talk to them straight or you can fire them, whatever you want to do,” he said.

The attitudes of business and HR leaders around monitoring their employees' every move had changed, Sivasubramaniam said.

“The same businesses, if I would have approached them two years back, they would say ‘I know these 40 people, they worked with me for five years, three years, 10 years. I don’t want to monitor them. I trust them … But now it’s totally different. The mindset is completely changing,” he said.

But as more companies look to purchase the software and there are more products in the market, Director of The Australian Institute's Centre for Responsible Technology Peter Lewis said "we are at a crossroads" with the constant creep of these surveillance technologies in the workplace, and is calling for laws to be updated around the technologies.

"The laws haven't been updated for 20 years. There does need to be an update around what legitimate uses are and what rights employees have. First, to be aware the technology exists and to have some control over how it's being used."

"There are proposals for the law to manage the use of facial recognition technology used in workplaces which monitor everything from toilet breaks to whether people are organising their union. The software installed in computers to work in operating systems is monitoring keystrokes but also eye movements when people are in meetings. The Centre for Responsible Technology thinks this is a massive extension of the power of employers in the work environment," Lewis said.

He said the data could lead managers to make poor decisions, including whether to sack employees. "Anyone who has employed people knows that data can give you part of a profile of employees but ... (this technology) can lead you to making-decision based on really bad inputs."