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Bossware is a big legal risk

Workplace surveillance tools are extremely popular. Some may also be illegal.

Beyond such obvious types of surveillance, bossware can come in more subtle forms, like tools that aggregate employee sentiment from emails or their private social media–ostensibly to gauge their job satisfaction. Abruzzo writes in her memo that numerous types of bossware already run afoul of, in her words, “settled Board law.” For example, monitoring “protected concerted activity” (i.e., workplace organizing) has been illegal for decades. A Harvard Business Review study showed, for example, that monitored employees were “substantially more likely to take unapproved breaks, disregard instructions, damage workplace property, steal office equipment, and purposefully work at a slow pace, among other rule-breaking behaviors.”

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