Slack and Teams are super useful: they enable fast communication in the office, enable remote work and work from home, and allow employees to easily share different content. The downside of this is that bosses can also use them to monitor what you do and how active you are during the work day.
How bad can this boss monitoring be? Let’s take a look at what bosses can see in these apps and what you can keep private.
Slack
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Apps like Slack, Teams, and other common business collaboration platforms are structured through administrator permissions. In other words, with the right permissions, your boss can have a lot of control over the platform and what happens on it. And if the manager goes to IT – well, they can ask to see almost everything that’s going on in the application.
Slack can export communication data for companies on demand for lower-tier plans, and higher-tier plans can give company management the ability to directly access the information. Supervisors with permissions can see things like:
- All messages sent to the platform in any way, including the ability to search for a specific time frame or specific words (private or public channels do not matter in this case).
- The current status of any employee on the platform.
- General information about how employees use the platform, what types of files are shared, and so on.
Slack doesn’t delete messages, but it can limit how companies can search messages or let employers decide how long messages are stored. For high-level Enterprise Slack subscriptions, employers can view almost everything that Slack is used for.
Zoom
Zoom / Zoom
Zoom has changed a lot during the telecommuting boom and has generally become more friendly to employee privacy over time. The app lets you separate your business and personal accounts, for example, which is always a good idea. You can also stream Zoom meetings directly to your desktop instead of the cloud, which adds some additional privacy options for certain videos. However, the business version of Zoom allows supervisors to:
- Read all chat messages sent between employees via a saved transcript after the meeting.
- View meetings uploaded to the cloud on your business account.
- See when meetings are held, who is in them, and when participants join or leave meetings.
At one point, Zoom had a feature known as “participant attention tracking.” This feature essentially notifies meeting hosts if participants are likely not focused on the meeting because the Zoom application window is not active. It’s worth noting that Zoom removed this feature on April 2, 2020.
Teams
Microsoft
Microsoft Teams allows for a lot of employer tracking, depending on how much bosses want to see. Generally, if you’re doing something on Teams, your employer can see it if they want — there’s absolutely no privacy guaranteed. With the right settings, bosses have the ability to:
- Track all conversations, calls and meetings on any channel.
- Track employee status, including how long they’ve been active in teams and how long they’ve been absent.
- See the apps and Teams tools employees use (within Teams).
Google Workspace
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Employers also have an incredible amount of spying power in Google Workspace, if they’re willing to pay for it. High-level plans allow supervisors access to a “vault”, which contains almost everything. This means that employers can:
- Search content from Google Drive, Groups, Chats, Voice Chat, Classic Hangouts, and Google Meet.
- Search content sent by linked Gmail accounts (including drafts of unsent emails).
- Track login times and activities.
- Track how users create and submit content.
Additional bossware
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Business collaboration applications are just the beginning. There is a whole additional field of software known as bossware or tattleware, which employers can require workers to install. These include tools such as Hubstaff, InterGuard, Teramind and TimeCamp.
Tools like these can monitor which social media apps you use and how long you use them, and even collect data about how you use social media — including what you type in your personal accounts. Timers and exceptions can be created, so employers have the ability to customize this tracking software in many ways. Other apps like Hubstaff can take screenshots of your desktop, while Teramind can record in real time on demand. And most bossware can at least track mouse movements and keystrokes to see how “active” you are.
If that sounds like it might be invasive or harmful, the Center for Democracy and Technology seems to agree. They warned that bossware can be dangerous to the health of employees.
Is it legal?
Generally speaking, yes. A few states require employers to provide written notice to employees that they will be monitored, but this is not yet common either. As long as the employer does not discriminate by targeting specific employees to be supervised and does not supervise employees outside of working hours, there is no legal recourse at this time.
There isn’t much legal precedent yet, but employers have a lot of wiggle room here because employees can theoretically choose to quit rather than submit to surveillance. State regulations have traditionally been very slow to catch up with these trends.
What can I do about this?
Nothing in your business collaboration apps is private. Follow that rule and you shouldn’t have much to worry about. If your bosses are actively monitoring your status and activity to gauge your productivity, there are some ways to counter this, such as making sure your Microsoft Teams status is always active or using a mouse shaker to simulate mouse activity when you’re AFK. For particularly invasive bossware, there’s not much choice at this point other than to consider whether the deal is worth it and what your other options are.
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Source: newstars.edu.vn