Workplace surveillance has become routine across the American labor market. Employers now track where employees go, how productive they are, and even what they say to one another, using technology that spread rapidly during the pandemic and never really receded. Location trackers, task-completion monitors, and cameras built into work laptops and phones are quietly reshaping how much privacy a person has, even while working from their own living room.
Monitoring workers is nothing new, but artificial intelligence and modern data science have changed the scale of it. Companies can now assemble detailed profiles on employees that go far beyond simple oversight, sometimes used to discipline workers or to try to anticipate how they'll behave. Wilneida Negrón, who studies these systems at the worker-advocacy nonprofit Coworker, has noted that the employees with the least bargaining power in the labor market are often the first ones subjected to the most invasive forms of data collection.
Some of the most widely used monitoring platforms have quietly passed employee names, emails, and other personal information to outside data brokers and tech firms, according to a joint investigation by researchers at Vanderbilt, Northeastern, and UC Berkeley — often without making that sharing clear to the workers being monitored.
The human cost of this surveillance shows up in specific stories. Lannie Duong, a pharmacist at a medical clinic, spent her days reviewing patients' medical histories and lab results, adjusting medications for people managing diabetes, heart disease, and hypertension, often working through interpreters for patients with limited English. Her employer tracked exactly how long her phone calls and appointments ran, and her performance reviews questioned why she was spending so much time with each patient. She described feeling that literally everything was being counted, down to the minute, while she was expected to accomplish an unreasonable workload. The pressure left her feeling distrusted and hopeless enough that she eventually took medical leave and began organizing with fellow pharmacists to unionize. She spoke up in hopes that colleagues would join her, but that support didn't fully materialize — and she says she was ultimately terminated following her leave.
Negrón points out that not all employers hide their surveillance practices; many are upfront about it and involve employee committees in deciding how monitoring tools get used. But plenty of others rank, score, and track employees in ways workers never see or consent to. She believes workers need to organize collectively, because the push toward centralized tracking is accelerating faster than individual employees can respond to.
Hayley Tsukayama of the Electronic Frontier Foundation has observed growing pushback from workers against tools that measure task speed, arguing that this kind of monitoring can contribute to physical injury and raises real questions about what data is being gathered and how it's used. Still, she's blunt about the baseline reality: if you're using equipment your employer issued, you should assume some degree of monitoring is happening.
Negrón recommends that workers research surveillance norms in their own industry ahead of time, so they aren't blindsided later by information gathered without their knowledge. Arianna Anaya learned this the hard way while teaching a college writing course — she discovered that a school administrator had been reading the personal essays her students submitted through the learning platform, along with her own comments on their work. Students often wrote about deeply personal subjects like abuse, eating disorders, and family trauma, material they'd been told administrators wouldn't see. A colleague who printed out her comments criticized her casual tone with students and claimed she'd strayed from the syllabus. Months later, her teaching contract wasn't renewed, though she was never given a clear reason. She described the experience as leaving her paranoid and less confident that she could feel safe going about her work.
Legal protections vary significantly by state. New York, Connecticut, Delaware, and Maine all require employers to disclose when monitoring is taking place, and Maine goes further by barring visual surveillance in employees' homes or personal vehicles unless it's genuinely necessary for the job. Privacy and AI compliance manager Edward Halle notes that this creates real ambiguity — a telehealth nurse clearly needs a camera as part of the job itself. Still, a webcam monitoring someone doing ordinary desk work is a much harder case, and regulators will likely have to sort out exactly where that boundary sits. In states without disclosure requirements, workers often have little way of knowing whether they're being tracked at all.
For employees who want to raise the issue, Tsukayama recommends going through a union where possible. Without one, she suggests approaching managers individually with curiosity rather than confrontation — mentioning something noticed on a work computer and asking how that information gets used internally and whether it could end up outside the company. Aiha Nguyen of Data & Society's Labor Futures Initiative suggests simply asking what data your employer collects; if your manager doesn't know, IT departments often do, since they're usually the ones enabling these features in the first place. Common tools like Microsoft Office and Zoom include tracking capabilities that aren't always switched on. Because they're built into software people already use for work, it can be nearly impossible to tell when those features are active. Nguyen notes that this dynamic lets employers frame tracking as simply a mandatory part of using company software.
Experts generally advise keeping personal and family matters off work devices entirely — most people already understand this in theory, Nguyen says, but the inconvenience of switching devices, or the sense that it's not really that risky, often leads people to blur the line anyway.