The numbers come first: nine platforms, 121 documented data-sharing instances, 145 third-party domains — and one of them is Yandex, the Russian search company.
Researchers from Vanderbilt University, Northeastern University and the University of California at Berkeley ran a controlled test. They signed up as an employer, deployed nine widely used monitoring platforms — including Hubstaff, Deputy and Time Doctor 2 — then logged in as a worker to capture what the apps actually transmitted. Every single platform shared identifying worker data, including names and email addresses, with outside companies. Recipients included Facebook, Google, Microsoft and the ad-tech firm AppLovin. Separately, the nine apps routed workers' IP addresses, device information and browsing data to 145 third-party domains, among them Yandex.
The surveillance footprint does not stop at the desktop. A third of the nine platforms could track a worker's precise location even when the app was running in the background or the employee was off the clock. Three of the nine required access to a phone's motion sensors simply to clock in.
'Oftentimes, the workers with the least amount of power in the labor markets tend to be testing grounds for some of the more intrusive forms of data collection,' said Wilneida Negrón, director of research and policy at Coworker, a nonprofit that helps workers organize to improve working conditions. Negrón also noted that many employers use surveillance tools transparently and engage employee boards in reviewing how those tools are used — but that others track, rank and score employees in ways not disclosed to workers.
The human cost surfaces in the details. Pharmacist Lannie Duong said her employer tracked the length of her phone calls and appointments and questioned in performance evaluations why she spent so long with each patient — patients with chronic conditions such as diabetes, hypertension and heart disease who frequently required interpreters. 'Everything was counted. How many minutes you're on the phone. The minutiae of it was ridiculous,' Duong said. She says her employment was terminated after she took medical leave.
College administrators, according to the investigation, read an adjunct professor's comments to students on personal essays. Scanners on a warehouse conveyor belt monitored the pace of workers to ensure they inspected hundreds of items per hour.
Employers have always monitored workers. But advances in artificial intelligence and data science now allow them to build extensive data sets — what Negrón calls 'dossiers' — that can be used to punish workers or attempt to predict employee behavior.
CEO Times take: The data trail here raises two distinct concerns that free-market readers should separate. First, the legitimate employer interest in productivity is not the same thing as routing worker data to a Russian search engine without disclosure. Property rights cut both ways: employees have a reasonable expectation that their personal information will not be silently monetized by a third-party vendor their employer hired. Second, the liability exposure for any company whose bossware quietly handed IP addresses and device data to Yandex is real and growing. Capital rewards clear rules — and right now the rules governing what monitoring vendors can do with the data they harvest are anything but clear. Congress and state legislatures that want to protect free enterprise without expanding the administrative state have a narrow, specific target here: mandate disclosure, not prohibition. Workers deserve to know exactly where their data goes. So do shareholders.
