Is Your Boss Spying on You? (page 5 of 6)

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The Future of Employer Snooping

Some companies are going beyond the desktop to monitor their employees.

Radio frequency ID chips in employee key cards serve the same function as time-clock punch cards, allowing employers to know when workers enter the office and even track their movements within a building. One downside: The cards can be lost or stolen. In 2006 CityWatcher.com, a video-surveillance firm, dealt with that flaw by implanting RFID chips in the arms of two willing workers authorized to enter a secure room holding government surveillance videos.

GPS-enabled cell phones can serve a similar function outside the office, transmitting signals that alert supervisors when a worker leaves a particular building, and mapping his or her movements on a computer screen.

Geofencing technology by a company called Xora can be incorporated into cell phones. Once installed, it can send e-mail alerts when an employee drives too fast or loiters too long in one spot. Employers can also designate specific areas—bars, sports venues, home addresses—as off-limits during work hours. Phones can then send an alert if a worker strays into the prohibited locations.

Biometric devices are increasingly being deployed by private companies and government agencies to control building access. Scans of workers’ fingerprints, irises or retinas can be used in conjunction with, or in place of, electronic badges. Wasp Barcode Technologies makes a biometric attendance-tracking system that requires employees to place a finger on an electronic reader instead of punching in with a time card. A worker playing hooky can’t have a buddy clock in for him. Unlike the RFID chip in an electronic ID badge, a biometric marker can’t generally be tampered with (though there have been claims that fingerprints can be duplicated).

To Frederick Lane, author of The Naked Employee, biometric scans raise significant privacy concerns. One issue: The retina may indicate the presence of some diseases, such as AIDS, a congestive heart condition and hypertension. “If someone worked at a company for a long time,” he says, “you could probably take a series of snapshots of an individual retina over a period of time and make an inference if they were developing some medical condition.”

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