A lot of this seems to be in breach of Switzerland's very strict privacy laws. I was wondering if anyone has any experience of such software here? Has this been used ever without user consent? Would anyone be happy working for a company that uses such software?
I was reading a Twitter thread last night about the rise of productivity monitoring software. It was quite dystopian, going from monitoring email/internet use (which I take as normal) up to taking and monitoring screen shots of work computers without user knowledge to AI linked security cameras reading body language and intermittent monitoring through computer cameras.
Seeing that that is not allowed here, I doubt that anyone in Switzerland or Europe has experienced this.
Well... depends how you define things, what data is collected and how it is used. Software such as nextthink is widespread.
You find this kind of junk in America - if you're an employee some companies do all kinds of stuff to monitor you - cameras, security software, etc... far beyond regulatory burdens (data retention for instance) and well into intrusive spying.
As roegner pointed out, Switzerland does a good job protecting folks from this nonsense, one of the reasons my family lives here and not in the US.
Many or even most companies in Switzerland breach the employee privacy law, you most likely gave a consent for this in your job contract either directly or indirectly agreeing to obey some company security rules guidelines. But it depends what it is used for. If it's for security to act on security breach, fine. If it's for checking at a very high level if you've been at work given day, fine. However as a developer of such type of software I can tell you that the demand for unethical features giving any kind of BS metric of employee performance is in high demand. Most of the time the purpose is not advertised directly in the product specs, so the law violation is not that obvious, but the sales and solution architects work with customers to teach them how to leverage these features.
My employer installed this software https://help.aternity.com/bundle/con…ered_list.html
By reading the description, one can deduct it’s what Gravity mentions. Not a explicit feature but a bit post-processing gets you there.
Perhaps it's time to look for a new challenge?
A lot of enterprise firms have deployed this software for performance analysis of workstations. The added benefit (for them) is that it can also provide insights into e.g. application usage.
Perhaps a better productive activity would be to first figure out what software is installed where. An inventory itself can be surprising.