To complete the experiment, I gave my editor, Pui-Wing Tam, the keys to the Hubstaff program so she could track me. After three weeks of digital monitoring, the future of work surveillance seemed to both of us to be overly intrusive. Adam: I downloaded Hubstaff to my laptop and phone with more than a touch of skepticism. I had heard of this type of tool being used by Wall Street firms for years, mainly in the name of security, with employees rarely having any say about how they were being watched.
Dave Nevogt, a founder and the chief executive of Hubstaff, who gave me a free trial to test its subscription software, said work-from-home orders in the coronavirus outbreak had made employee-monitoring software a hot ticket. Nevogt told me. Workers know they are being watched, so it does not violate privacy, he added.
One main feature of Hubstaff is an activity monitor that gives managers a snapshot of what an employee is doing. Broken down in minute increments, the system tallies what percentage of time the worker has been typing or moving the computer mouse. That percentage acts as a productivity score. I tried to embrace the feedback. Each day, an email was sent to me and Pui-Wing with an overview of my day: hours worked, the productivity score, and the websites and apps that I was using. One day last month, when I was putting the finishing touches on an article , I spent 3 hours and 35 minutes editing the document, and an hour inside a file holding background research and interview notes.
Another 90 minutes were spent on email. This was one of my more productive days, but the software still tallied my deviations.
It showed I was on Twitter for 35 minutes and lost 11 minutes browsing Spotify. Slack, the collaboration tool, swallowed 22 minutes.
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Other days, food was a common distraction, including one minute hunt for takeout pizza. Hubstaff also logged my GPS coordinates, a feature that Mr. Nevogt said was mainly used by companies trying to ensure that their salespeople were visiting clients. Given that London has been on lockdown since late March , I had few movements to track.
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The software mainly caught me jogging around a nearby park. And going to a wine shop. If employee monitoring is being used, it is important that the most junior people are not surveilled to a greater extent than their managers, or at least not to an extent that places special burdens on them.
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For instance, it would be particularly troublesome if very junior employees received a level of surveillance — say, sentiment analysis or keyboard logging — that only slightly more senior people did not. The impulse to monitor is understandable, especially in these times. But as people return to their offices — and even as some continue to work from home — look for places to pull back monitoring efforts where things are going well.
This communicates trust to employees. It also corrects for the tendency to acquire more control than necessary when circumstances are not as severe as they once were. At the end of the day, your employees are your most valuable assets. They possess institutional knowledge and skills others do not. If your company does choose to move ahead with surveillance software in this climate, you need to remind yourself that you are not the police.
You should be monitoring employees not with a raised baton, but with an outstretched hand. If our content helps you to contend with coronavirus and other challenges, please consider subscribing to HBR. A subscription purchase is the best way to support the creation of these resources. You have 1 free article s left this month.
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Create an account to read 2 more. Read more on Ethics or related topics Managing people and Technology. Robert Mercer is a conservative activist, computer scientist, and a co-founder of Cambridge Analytica. Christopher Wylie is the former director of research at Cambridge Analytica. Steve Bannon is a co-founder of Cambridge Analytica, as well as a founding member and former executive chairman of Breitbart News, an alt-right news outlet.
Breitbart News has reportedly received funding from the Mercer family as far back as Bannon left Breitbart in January According to Christopher Wylie, Bannon is responsible for testing phrases such as " drain the swamp " at Cambridge Analytica, which were used extensively on Breitbart. Aleksandr Kogan is a Senior Research Associate at Cambridge University and co-founder of Global Science Research, which created the data harvesting thisisyourdigitiallife app.
He worked as a researcher and consultant for Facebook in and Kogan also received Russian government grants and is an associate professor at St. Petersburg State University, though he claims this is an honorary role.
How to Successfully Monitor Employee Internet Usage
Joseph Chancellor was a co-director of Global Science Research, which created the data harvesting thisisyourdigitiallife app. Around November , he was hired by Facebook as a "quantitative social psychologist. Michal Kosinski , David Stillwell , and Thore Graepel are the researchers who proposed and developed the model to "psychometrically" analyze users based on their Facebook likes. At the time this model was published, Kosinski and Stillwell were affiliated with Cambridge University, while Graepel was affiliated with the Cambridge-based Microsoft Research. None have an association with Cambridge Analytica, according to Cambridge University.
He founded the website in from his dorm room at Harvard. She left Google to join the company in March She became the eighth member of the company's board of directors in and is the first woman in that role. Collins is responsible for issuing orders to seize documents from the American founder of Six4Three while he was traveling in London, and releasing those documents publicly. Chris Hughes is one of four Facebook co-founders, who originally took on beta testing and feedback for the website, until leaving in Hughes is the first to call for Facebook to be broken up by regulators.
Each time Facebook finds itself embroiled in a privacy scandal, the general playbook seems to be the same: Mark Zuckerberg delivers an apology, with oft-recycled lines, such as "this was a big mistake," or "I know we can do better. This is by design--founding president Sean Parker indicated at an Axios conference in November that the first step of building Facebook features was "How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible? The announcement indicated, correctly, that "Kogan gained access to this information in a legitimate way and through the proper channels that governed all developers on Facebook at that time," and passing the information to a third party was against the platform policies.
The claim that this is a data breach is completely false. Aleksandr Kogan requested and gained access to information from users who chose to sign up to his app, and everyone involved gave their consent. People knowingly provided their information, no systems were infiltrated, and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked. On March 21, , Mark Zuckerberg posted his first public statement about the issue, stating in part that:.
I've been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn't happen again. On March 26, , Facebook placed full-page ads stating : "This was a breach of trust, and I'm sorry we didn't do more at the time. In a blog post on April 4, , Facebook announced a series of changes to data handling practices and API access capabilities. Foremost among these include limiting the Events API, which is no longer able to access the guest list or wall posts. Additionally, Facebook removed the ability to search for users by phone number or email address and made changes to the account recovery process to fight scraping.
Details about his testimony are in the next section of this article. On April 10, , Facebook announced the launch of its data abuse bug bounty program. While Facebook has an existing security bug bounty program, this is targeted specifically to prevent malicious users from engaging in data harvesting. On May 14, , "around " apps were banned from Facebook as part of an investigation into if companies have abused APIs to harvest personal information. The company declined to provide a list of offending apps. On May 22, , Mark Zuckerberg testified, briefly, before the European Parliament about the data privacy scandal and Cambridge Analytica.
The format of the testimony has been the subject of derision, as all of the questions were posed to Zuckerberg before he answered. Guy Verhofstadt, an EU Parliament member representing Belgium, said , "I asked you six 'yes' and 'no' questions, and I got not a single answer. In his Senate testimony on April 10, , Zuckerberg reiterated his apology, stating that "We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake.
And it was my mistake. And I'm sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I'm responsible for what happens here," adding in a response to Sen. John Thune that "we try not to make the same mistake multiple times.. Amy Klobuchar asked if Facebook had determined whether Cambridge Analytica and the Internet Research Agency were targeting the same users. Zuckerberg replied, "We're investigating that now. We believe that it is entirely possible that there will be a connection there. On June 11, , nearly pages of new testimony from Zuckerberg was released following promises of a follow-up to questions for which he did not have sufficient information to address during his Congressional testimony.
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The Washington Post notes that the release, "in some instances sidestepped lawmakers' questions and concerns," but that the questions being asked were not always relevant, particularly in the case of Sen. Ted Cruz, who attempted to bring attention to Facebook's donations to political organizations, as well as how Facebook treats criticism of "Taylor Swift's recent cover of an Earth, Wind and Fire song.
Following Cruz's withdrawal from the campaign in May , the Mercer family began supporting Donald Trump. In January , Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told investors that the election was "a big deal in terms of ad spend," and that through "using Facebook and Instagram ads you can target by congressional district, you can target by interest, you can target by demographics or any combination of those.
How to Monitor Your Employees — While Respecting Their Privacy
In October , Facebook announced changes to its advertising platform, requiring identity and location verification and prior authorization in order to run electoral advertising. In the wake of the fallout from the data privacy scandal, further restrictions were added in April , making "issue ads" regarding topics of current interest similarly restricted.
In secretly recorded conversations by an undercover team from Channel 4 News, Cambridge Analytica's Nix claimed the firm was behind the "defeat crooked Hillary" advertising campaign, adding, "We just put information into the bloodstream of the internet and then watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again over time to watch it take shape," and that "this stuff infiltrates the online community, but with no branding, so it's unattributable, untrackable.
UpGuard, the organization that found a public GitLab instance with code from AggregateIQ, has extensively detailed its connection to Cambridge Analytica and its involvement in Brexit campaigning. Additionally, The Guardian quotes Wylie as saying the company "was set up as a Canadian entity for people who wanted to work on SCL projects who didn't want to move to London. Due to the scrutiny Facebook is already facing regarding the Cambridge Analytica scandal, as well as the general nature of the social media giant's product being personal information, its strategy for GDPR compliance is similarly receiving a great deal of focus from users and other companies looking for a model of compliance.
While in theory the GDPR is only applicable to people residing in the EU, Facebook will require users to review their data privacy settings.