Look away for too long and the system logs you out. The Post also recently reported that there’s an emerging trend among law firms to use facial recognition systems to make sure employees are paying attention to their screens. Some workers even claimed to the Post that their pay is docked if the monitoring systems indicate that their activity levels were decreed inadequate. It can also monitor email and instant messages, take sporadic screenshots of an employee’s computer, and track their keystrokes.
As the Washington Post reported last year, the pandemic has boosted demand for a cottage industry of software like InterGuard, which keeps a minute-by-minute record of the apps and websites employees use throughout the day and labels each activity as productive or unproductive. Lorenzo’s boss may have been merely paying attention to whether his icon was green or yellow, but corporate surveillance systems for work-from-home employees can get far more sophisticated. (“Lorenzo de Medici” is the pseudonym he uses for his mouse mover business in order to preserve his standing in the health care industry.) The decision proved to be prescient: In March 2020, when the pandemic forced millions of people to work from home, sales of the mouse mover tripled, according to Lorenzo. The contraption worked so well his wife convinced him to have it professionally manufactured and sold as part of a side business called Liberty Mouse Mover. His boss stopped pinging him whenever he stepped away from his desk. He constructed a movable platform using plastic Tupperware, a wooden frame, and a motor that could physically shift his mouse left and right. An engineer by training, Lorenzo decided on a hardware fix. He found a software program that would move his cursor for him while he was away, but using software was something IT could detect. Lorenzo tried fiddling with his company-issued computer’s settings so that it wouldn’t go to sleep so quickly, but the IT department had configured the devices so that the sleep settings couldn’t be changed. The early, DIY version of Lorenzo’s mouse mover. “It was a very uncomfortable, frustrating situation where you’re sort of tied to your desk and afraid to even go to the bathroom.”
“Regardless of what my productivity actually was, he would just give me heck when I would step away from my computer,” Lorenzo said. After Lorenzo responded, his boss chided him and said he should keep his time away from his desk to a minimum. One day, he ran to the store to get some milk, and when he returned, he saw messages from his boss asking where he was and whether he was working that day. Whenever Lorenzo would step away for a few minutes to refill his coffee or use the restroom, his Lync profile invariably reported him as inactive. The company used the workplace messaging service Microsoft Lync, which would display a green icon on employee profiles if they were active and a yellow icon if their computer had gone to sleep. But Lorenzo soon found that his employer was monitoring him more closely than he had anticipated. He was between full-time office jobs and liked that the temporary gig allowed him to take his son to school in the morning, walk his dog at lunch, and generally have more flexibility during the day.
In 2017, Lorenzo, who works in health care, took on a temporary document-reviewing gig he could do from home.