Opinion: ‘Bossware’ fight reveals dystopian reality

Editor’s note: Jeff Yang He is a frequent contributor to CNN Opinion, co-host of the podcast “They Call Us Bruce” and author of the best-selling book “RISE: A History of Asian American Pop from the ’90s to Now“and”The Golden Screen: Films that Made Asian Americans.The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. Further comments On CNN.

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Workplaces often boast that they treat their employees “like family.” That sounds great, but when you think about how your actual family treats you, it might not be so. The annoying sibling who keeps borrowing your things without asking permission? The weird uncle that no one wants to talk about or even talk about? The overbearing parent with high expectations?

Most of the work that’s right Like family. Especially that last part: Corporate America is obsessed with helping employees stay productive while working remotely and away from the scrutiny of management. That’s why it shouldn’t have surprised anyone when Bloomberg reported this month that Wells Fargo had fired more than a dozen employees for “simulating keyboard activity” (in other words, pretending to be online).

It’s not hard to imagine the kinds of fake productivity gadgets these employees might have been using: “Mouse Jigger” is a suspiciously named gadget that randomly moves the mouse or touchpad in small movements to keep the device from going to sleep during long downloads or other periods of inactivity, but it’s frequently used by employees who are away from their keyboards. It looks like it’s working hard. Or maybe it’s a keystroke simulator, as the label says, simulating keyboard strokes.

For Wells Fargo, laying off a dozen or so of its roughly 200,000 employees is unlikely to change the commercial outlook for the third-largest U.S. bank by assets. But the move isn’t really about commerce, it’s about control. And Wells Fargo’s crackdown on these gadgets is just the latest attempt by big companies to rein in what they see as lazy behavior from remote employees.

According to a Harvard Business Review survey, nearly four in 10 managers question the diligence of their remote employees and believe that employees perform worse when left alone at home. And they’re probably not entirely wrong: An Intuit survey found that more than three-quarters of remote employees admitted to running personal errands at least sometimes during work hours.

But while the majority of workers surveyed said they average less than 45 minutes of time for themselves per day, most employers estimate that more than half of their remote workers steal more than an hour per day. This perception gap reflects a large and growing mutual distrust between American workers and employers.

According to a survey by security platform Cerby, only 20% of employees say they have a lot of trust in their managers, which is disappointing. But it’s not so bad, as only 12% of managers said they are “completely confident in their team’s productivity” in a Microsoft survey on hybrid work productivity. It seems this level of paranoia is what’s driving companies to invest in a variety of very creepy ways to monitor, restrict, and lock down their employees, a term known in the tech industry as “bossware.”

Once installed on employees’ computers and mobile devices, these tools can invisibly monitor and, if necessary, restrict activity that the company deems wasteful, unproductive, or out of bounds. Some bossware apps secretly capture screenshots of employees’ monitors, while others track employees’ locations and movements. The most extreme apps actually remotely hijack laptop webcams, allowing employers to capture live video and audio of employees and their surroundings. This is a major invasion of privacy and can have very embarrassing consequences.

But the digital privacy advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation points out that, while harmful, many forms of bossware are perfectly legal. Under current law in most states, employers have the right to install on company-issued equipment whatever tools they deem necessary to ensure that employees are working hard and refraining from wasteful, dangerous, or illegal behavior. (In New York, Connecticut, and Delaware, employers must give employees advance notice.)

If these tools chain you to your desk like a beast of burden, scream at you with an earsplitting howl when you can’t produce 350 lines of optimized code per hour, and accidentally photograph your spouse walking across the living room wearing nothing but a hand towel, there’s little you can do other than quit. Right?

That’s right… that’s where active countermeasures like mouse jigglers, keystroke simulators, and Zoom presence spoofers come in. Employees are using these tools to fight back against Big Brother in the boardroom in a technology arms race that’s only getting more intense as devices become more sophisticated.

When companies deploy facial recognition software to help remote workers stay focused during meetings, employees might fight back with deepfake persona masks that show their faces awake and alert while they sleep and relax on Zoom. When companies impose productivity quotas enforced by virtual hustle bots that encourage employees to spend more time in the “zone,” employees might outsource their work to generative AI or sophisticated chatbots. And when companies deploy algorithmic social media analysis to see if employees are disgruntled and looking for new employment, employees might get new jobs. and Keep your previous job and work two or more full-time jobs at the same time.

Of course, these little acts of tech resistance won’t solve everything for everyone. For example, as I learned firsthand, no amount of fiddling with a mouse will get you a CNN op-ed finished on time. Meanwhile, large language models aren’t yet capable of writing good opinion essays (at least by my standards, or those of my editors). So, for now, I can stay in the “family” without getting caught up in a dystopian game of cat and mouse of surveillance and subterfuge.

But maybe I’ll put some masking tape over my webcam just to be safe.