Fighting The ‘Big Brother’ Fallacy In Workplace Tech

Return to work

By Michael Moran

With the world taking another crack at a “return to work” this autumn, a spate of stories have appeared warning of a byproduct of the global pandemic: A reset of societal norms when it comes to privacy expectations in the workplace. In recent weeks, everyone from The Wall Street Journal to The New York Times to The New York Review of Books has weighed in. There’s even been some action in the U.S. Senate, where Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., is asking the Labor Department to take a fresh look at what has become known as “surveillance tech.”

The best of these pieces carefully parses the advantages and disadvantages of technological innovations born of the pandemic emergency. But the general tone has been disappointingly alarmist and without context: The transformed worker-employer relationship is also a byproduct of the pandemic, and one I would argue will make most workplaces more rather than less humane.

There are indeed instances of companies that have used the pandemic as an excuse to push into clearly unethical (if not illegal) frontiers of surveillance. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an NGO that monitors data privacy matters, breaks these so-called “bossware” products into two broad categories: those that employees know about and can possibly control, and those that secretly snoop on employees, in the office or remotely, with no consent. Some of this stuff is dastardly; others dangerous and evil. The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow documented the story of NSO, an Israeli software firm that produced a deep-link surveillance software called Pegasus sold to governments to track dissidents.

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