The 105 page 'Electronic Monitoring and Surveillance in the Workplace: Literature review and policy recommendations' by Kirstie Ball (European Commission Joint Research Centre) report
re-evaluates the literature about surveillance/monitoring in the standard workplace, in home working during the COVID 19 pandemic and in respect of digital platform work. It utilised a systematic review methodology. A total of 398 articles were identified, evaluated and synthesised.
The report finds that worker surveillance practices have extended to cover many different features of the employees as they work. Surveillance in the workplace targets thoughts, feelings and physiology, location and movement, task performance and professional profile and reputation. In the standard workplace, more aspects of employees’ lives are made visible to managers through data.
Employees’ work/non-work boundaries are contested terrain. The surveillance of employees working remotely during the pandemic has intensified, with the accelerated deployment of keystroke, webcam, desktop and email monitoring in Europe, the UK and the USA. Whilst remote monitoring is known to create work-family conflict, and skilled supervisory support is essential, there is a shortage of research which examines these recent phenomena.
Digital platform work features end-to-end worker surveillance. Data are captured on performance, behaviours and location, and are combined with customer feedback to determine algorithmically what work and reward are offered to the platform worker in the future. There is no managerial support and patchy colleague support in a hyper-competitive and gamified freelance labour market.
Once again there is a shortage of research which specifically addresses the effects of monitoring on those who work on digital platforms. Excessive monitoring has negative psycho-social consequences including increased resistance, decreased job satisfaction, increased stress, decreased organisational commitment and increased turnover propensity. The design and application of monitoring, as well as the managerial practices, processes and policies which surround it influence the incidence of these psycho-social risks.
Policy recommendations target at mitigating the psycho-social risks of monitoring and draw upon privacy, data justice and organisational justice principles. Numerous recommendations are derived both for practice and for higher level policy development.
'What is Privacy? That's the Wrong Question' by Woodrow Hartzog in (2021) 88(7) The University of Chicago Law Review 1677-1688 comments
Every year on the first day of my course on information privacy law, I ask my students to define the concept of privacy. Usually, I get a few different answers, each of which is built around some singular and definitive conceptualization of privacy. Some notions include: Privacy is “control over personal information.” Privacy is “secrecy.” Privacy is the “right to be left alone.” And so on. Then I gently push back, asking my students about notions of privacy that fall outside their definition. Which definition should the law adopt? All of these definitions seem right, yet somehow not enough. I ask whether it is a good idea to define privacy so broadly that it is synonymous with all personal interference. My goal is for students to appreciate that there are many ways to conceptualize privacy, each of which is underinclusive or overinclusive. I point to the many ways that scholars have explored various components of the important but remarkably vague notion of privacy, happy to leave its definitive boundaries undefined. Scholars and lawmakers are not always so comfortable with such uncertainty; I have made my peace.
