Workplace Surveillance Is Here, Counting Your Mouse Clicks and Bathroom Breaks

Tessa knew she was being watched. After ten minutes of keyboard or mouse inactivity, a timer would appear on her transcription software, asking her to select a reason for the pause. A medical transcriptionist in Atlantic Canada, Tessa (who has been granted a pseudonym to avoid any conflict with her employer) works remotely, spending her days alone with doctors’ voices and diagnostic codes. Fusion, the platform she uses, logged her inactivity in detail, and Microsoft Teams displayed an “Away” status just five minutes after her last keystroke. Her employer had set a target: transcribe at least eighty minutes of audio dictation per shift. Falling short could raise questions—especially if the inactivity logs suggested too much downtime.

There were no meetings, no memos, and no consultations when the system was introduced—only a training session and the unspoken expectation that any lull needed explaining. “Especially working from home, I feel the surveillance is much more imposed,” she says.

Surveillance at work isn’t new. For years, employers have monitored warehouse staff, delivery drivers, and call centre employees—often in the name of efficiency, safety, or customer service. These environments offered early test beds for surveillance tools: GPS location tracking, productivity quotas, call recordings, and biometric scanners. But what began on shop floors and factory lines is now migrating into white-collar professions. Contract lawyers and remote administrative staff are increasingly subject to the same forms of monitoring—only digitized and dispersed across home offices and laptops. For many workers, both remote and in person, the workplace has quietly shifted into a site of constant measurement—where every pause can trigger scrutiny and where productivity is no longer just about results but continuous presence.

Tessa’s experience is far from unique. Surveillance technologies are now embedded across nearly every aspect of the digital workplace. These systems can collect sweeping amounts of data, often well beyond what’s necessary to perform a job. Voiceprints, facial recognition, movement patterns, and even sleep cycles or private conversations can become part of a digital profile that’s silently monitored and evaluated.

The pandemic accelerated the shift. When COVID-19 forced offices to go remote, the informal structure of the workplace fell away. “If you were in the office, you were at work,” explains Matt Hatfield, executive director of digital rights group OpenMedia. Informal cues, like a manager’s glance or a colleague’s nudge, could guide performance without the need for granular oversight. But remote work disrupted that tacit system. While many employees adapted well without direct supervision, others struggled, and many managers found themselves flying blind—unsure of how staff were spending their time or how to intervene. Surveillance software promised a fix. A new crop of “bossware” applications—such as Teramind, Kickidler, Time Doctor, StaffCop, and Hubstaff—became much more common in the workplace, offering real-time tracking of employee activity, screen captures, and productivity scoring.

According to a 2023 report by the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, or IPC, Canadian businesses in high remote-capacity fields—including finance, education, and professional services—found that the use of employee monitoring apps rose by 22 percent post-pandemic. More than half of respondents reported using them, particularly in larger firms. While most cited cybersecurity as their rationale, the most common use in practice was to track employee output. Jobs that involve repetitive or screen-based tasks—customer service, logistics, tech support, remote sales—tend to be the most tightly monitored.

Sarah Ryan, senior research officer and policy analyst with the Canadian Union of Public Employees, or CUPE—the country’s largest union representing more than 750,000 workers—notes that workplace surveillance is showing up across virtually all sectors for members, often without their knowledge. “Workplace surveillance tools are becoming more pervasive and invasive as a slew of new types of digital technology are introduced year over year,” Ryan explains.

Now, the newest frontier involves AI systems capable of analyzing those data streams not just for presence or pace but for patterns—benchmarking workers against their peers, scoring minute behavioural metrics, and, increasingly, making decisions without human review. “Surveillance data may be fed into opaque algorithms that can impact access to training, choice of work shifts, or whether workers are disciplined or dismissed,” warns Ryan, adding that the data can also be used in ways that are biased and discriminatory and result in real harm to workers.

“Employers believe if they can measure everything, they can optimize everything—productivity, efficiency, even emotional tone,” says Hilke Schellmann, author of The Algorithm: How AI Decides Who Gets Hired, Monitored, Promoted, and Fired and Why We Need to Fight Back Now. “Some companies claim it’s about ‘insights,’ but often it’s really about discipline and deterrence.” Data doesn’t just reflect work; increasingly, it governs it.

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As a response to increasing surveillance, many workers have begun to reclaim agency in subtle, creative ways by staging what’s come to be known as “productivity theatre.” If surveillance turns every second of screen time into a data point, some employees have learned to play to the algorithm. That might mean moving a mouse periodically—or, more efficiently, plugging in an automatic “jiggler” that simulates activity. Others email co-workers just to keep their status light green, log into Slack early to suggest an early start, or join meetings that have no relevance to their job, simply to be seen. A whole niche industry has emerged to support this kind of resistance, selling devices that keep computers in a state of artificial activity. On TikTok, users share videos of their DIY solutions—rigging their mouse to a robot vacuum, say, to keep their digital presence intact while they take a break.

In this inverted reality, the appearance of working has become a form of labour in itself. Microsoft’s 2022 “Work Trend Index” offers a sense of the scale: the company surveyed 20,000 people across eleven countries and analyzed trillions of Microsoft 365 productivity signals. Workers reported spending nearly an hour each day performing these kinds of visibility-maintenance tasks—an hour that, paradoxically, could have gone toward actual work.

While some workers resort to tactical subversion, others are left with little recourse beyond quiet compliance. Unions like CUPE have stepped in—negotiating specific rules about surveillance into collective agreements and giving workers clear and enforceable rights on the job. If an employer breaks those rules, the union can file a grievance. Even without these agreements, CUPE can still challenge unfair surveillance under privacy law—but those cases are harder to win, since the law usually gives employers a lot of leeway. CUPE has called for high-risk technologies—such as biometric data collection, facial recognition, emotion recognition, and behavioural manipulation tools—to be banned outright in the workplace. But while unions play a powerful role in defending workers, many employees don’t have one to protect them—leaving legislation as their only safeguard.

Legal protections have failed to keep pace with the speed and scope of surveillance technologies. In Canada, workplace monitoring is governed by a fragmented and uneven set of federal and provincial privacy laws, offering little clarity and even less enforcement. According to the 2023 IPC report, approaches to regulating workplace surveillance vary widely—not only between provinces and the federal government, but also across sectors. The result is a patchwork system that leaves many workers confused about their rights and vulnerable to overreach.

In most provinces, including British Columbia and Alberta, legislation emphasizes employer notification and consent—but these mechanisms often fall short in addressing the structural power imbalance between employers and employees. Consent, where it is required, is rarely meaningful in environments where refusing surveillance could carry professional risks. Ontario, despite being Canada’s largest labour market, only recently introduced a notification requirement and offers no formal protections related to access, accuracy, purpose limitation, or redress. The laws in these provinces often defer to a standard of “reasonableness”—but one defined largely by employers.

“A colleague of ours once did a walkthrough of Toronto to see how many businesses with surveillance cameras were in compliance with provincial law. The truth is almost none are,” adds Hatfield.

Quebec stands as an outlier with its civil law framework, where the concept of dignity helps affirm certain worker rights, but that model hasn’t translated into other jurisdictions. Meanwhile, algorithmic management and other emerging technologies continue to outpace regulation. Existing privacy laws offer little direction on how these systems should be audited, limited, or made accountable. Even proposed legislation like the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act, or AIDA, has been criticized for vague protections and a governance model that places innovation and enforcement under the same federal body.

Looking ahead, the next frontier of workplace surveillance may go beyond tracking productivity to interpreting personality and emotion, according to Hatfield. As AI tools grow more sophisticated, some vendors are already pitching software that claims to detect tone, sentiment, or dissatisfaction in digital communications. These tools could be used to judge loyalty, attitude, emotional state, and “whether your employee is passive aggressive, undermining the organization, or otherwise showing undesirable feelings about their work,” Hatfield predicts.

What’s at stake isn’t just policy—it’s the experience of being human at work. “These tools reduce complex, nuanced human behaviour into binary data points—productive or unproductive, focused or distracted. There’s little room for neurodiversity, different working styles, or simply being human,” says Schellmann.

Tessa has felt the weight first-hand. On days when she’s tired or unwell, the pressure of constant tracking becomes harder to ignore.

“The fact that the timer pops up more often on Fusion—as well as my Teams status—and [the fear] that I will not reach the productivity goal in my day—it stresses me out,” she says. Though she’s never been penalized for too much inactivity, she lives with the quiet fear that one day she might be. “It still lingers in my head.”

In a 2023 meta-analysis of electronic performance monitoring, psychologist Daniel Ravid and his colleagues found that watching workers tends to have the opposite of its intended effect. It ultimately fails to achieve its core aim—actually improving performance. The more intense the monitoring, the more performance declines. The findings, published in Personnel Psychology, also linked surveillance to higher rates of burnout and turnover. Another report—the 2023 IPC study—found that monitored employees report significantly higher stress, heavier workloads, poorer relationships with supervisors, and greater career uncertainty than their non-monitored peers.

“The jury is still out if most of the surveillance is actually meaningful,” Schellmann adds. “If we are not sure what constitutes a ‘successful’ employee, how can we be sure the keystrokes a system logs are meaningful?”