Welcome ‘Bossware’! It Aids Your Employers to Spy on Your Brains

Bossware will now get into your employee's brains

It's no secret that a lot of bosses out there would love to get inside their employees' heads. And now, perhaps unfortunately for said employees, they might be actually starting to do so.

A number of companies have cropped up in recent years offering employers mind-reading devices for their workforce. InnerEye, for example, is an Israeli company that claims its headsets combine machine learning with the innate power of the human mind, ultimately helping workers eliminate indecisiveness and work faster than ever before. Emotiv, a San Francisco startup, claims to be able to track employees' well-being with wireless EEGs headsets.

Importantly, this employee-forward marketing approach distinguishes these devices — in branding efforts, at least — from "bossware," a growing field of consumer tech committed to offering employee surveillance in a remote work-driven world.

Still, marketing is just that: marketing, and given the prevalence of data mining and the steady rise of bossware, hesitant employees can be forgiven for feeling incredulous towards mind-reading headsets, particularly for their privacy's sake.

Bossware typically lives on a computer or smartphone and has privileges to access data about everything that happens on that device. Most bossware collects, more or less, everything that the user does. We looked at marketing materials, demos, and customer reviews to get a sense of how these tools work. There are too many individual types of monitoring to list here, but we'll try to break down the ways these products can surveil into general categories.

The broadest and most common type of surveillance is "activity monitoring." This typically includes a log of which applications and websites workers use. It may include whom they email or message—including subject lines and other metadata—and any posts they make on social media. Most bossware also records levels of input from the keyboard and mouse—for example, many tools give a minute-by-minute breakdown of how much a user types and clicks, using that as a proxy for productivity. Productivity monitoring software will attempt to assemble all of this data into simple charts or graphs that give managers a high-level view of what workers are doing.

Every product we looked at has the ability to take frequent screenshots of each worker's device, and some provide direct, live video feeds of their screens. This raw image data is often arrayed in a timeline, so bosses can go back through a worker's day and see what they were doing at any given point. Several products also act as a keylogger, recording every keystroke a worker makes, including unsent emails and private passwords. A couple even let administrators jump in and take over remote control of a user's desktop. These products usually don't distinguish between work-related activity and personal account credentials, bank data, or medical information.