Employers Are Turning To "Tattleware" To Monitor Employees

There is a new spy in town that is popular among employers. It is a a digital surveillance platform called Sneek.

Every minute or so, the program would capture a live photo of employees via their company laptop webcams. The ever-changing headshots were splayed across the wall of a digital conference waiting room that everyone on the team could see. Clicking on a colleague’s face would unilaterally pull them into a video call.

If you were lucky enough to catch someone goofing off or picking their nose, you could forward the offending image to a team chat via Sneek’s integration with the messaging platform Slack.

According to the Sneek co-founder Del Currie, the software is meant to replicate the office.

"We know lots of people will find it an invasion of privacy, we 100 percent get that, and it’s not the solution for those folks," Currie says. "But there’s also lots of teams out there who are good friends and want to stay connected when they’re working together."

For many, though, Sneek was a dealbreaker. Their experience was part of a wide-scale boom in worker surveillance– and one that's poised to become a standard feature of life on the job.

Remote surveillance software like Sneek, also known as "tattleware" or "bossware", represented something of a niche market pre-Covid. But that all changed in March 2020, as employers scrambled to pull together work-from-home policies out of thin air.

In April last year, Google queries for "remote monitoring" were up 212 percent year-on-year; by April this year, they would continued to surge by another 243 percent.

One of the major players in the industry, ActivTrak, reports that during March 2020 alone, the firm scaled up from 50 client companies to 800. Over the course of the pandemic, the company has maintained that growth, today boasting 9,000 customers – or, as it claims, more than 250,000 individual users.

Time Doctor, Teramind, and Hubstaff – which, together with ActivTrak, make up the bulk of the market – have all seen similar growth from prospective customers.