AIBU to think companies track employees working from home?

[Listeningin]

Recently I've had some odd conversations with colleagues including my manager which seem related to things I've said at home and never mentioned to anyone at work. Some are probably coincidences but it's happened enough that I'm starting to wonder. e.g. related to specific passing comments to my partner that I just wouldn't say to anyone at work as it's unprofessional to discuss other colleagues

Working from home with a company managed laptop there's probably some sort of tracking software installed but it seems like audio might be tracked outside of meetings or when the microphone is on mute. I also installed company mobile software onto my personal mobile to make it easier to arrange childcare around work which also makes me wonder if some things are tracked through there. The company mobile thing says it can track which personal apps you have installed but not the data.

I'm a pretty boring person and sure that companies don't monitor individual conversations, but AIBU to think companies have programs that can automatically track certain words or something - similar to e.g. alexa waking up when a key word is said?

Nope. You’re being paranoid.

Someone still has to go through it all or at very least look for keywords then read the context behind them. Labour intensive - unless they have software for that as well!

@KatherineJaneway there is software for that as well. I have worked with companies who do something very similar.

Thanks, good to know.

Unless you work for a really dodgy, small company that doesnt have a HR or legal dept then this is 100% not happening in the UK for sure

Work products (emails, teams messages, websites visited) of course are all disclosable and can be accessed by your employer if circumstances necessitate

Your personal info - camera, audio outside of meetings are protected by GDPR.

Who do you think has the time or interest to do that even if it was legal or possible?

A nephew of mine had 2 jobs on the go and his original employer pulled him up on it. They admitted they could hear him on other calls with his second job. So it does go on, justified or not.

Listen live does not exist unless you are using 1) a work telephone system 2) software that requires microphone use. I have never heard of a technology that does such a thing - by that I mean convert bug-wear.

Isn’t that most likely because he was on calls with his first job and forgot to mute when taking a call for second job?

If you have been told this many times, perhaps that's because you are indeed paranoid/exhibiting signs of mental health difficulties

It might well have been.

Yes, but they did actually listen to him and that's how it works. So OP may not be wrong in her suspicions.

Arctic sorry, I should have been clearer, I meant on here. Been here far too long. So when it was originally said that Alexa was listening all the time (as an example) we were told we were paranoid CTs!

IRL I find people are more sensible and most of my friends are far more techie than I am. I did have a neighbour tell me the HSBC ads about DNA were faked on Facebook, never mind them being plastered all over Euston on my commute.

It's great to have so many different views and experiences. To avoid being too specific I work in a role in the financial sector that automatically processes large amounts of data so there is strict monitoring around day to day employee activities.
I can see that confirmation bias and the odd moment of paranoia might account for some of it. But @ArcticSkewer there are well known cases, other people's experiences such as @EmmaEmerald, and my personal experience years ago of times when it has happened and it wasn't down to a mental health issue.

It was obvious alexa was 'always listening' as it had to be to hear the trigger words, anyone who invited such an intrusive device into their home should have surely considered that due to this it was always a possibility someone could listen. Its the same with some baby monitors when people don't change the factory password others can watch and listen in, or tune into the radio frequency; vanishingly rare but not impossible for odd people to do this if people aren't security savvy.

When considering whether an employer is though the key question would be why would they want to and how would they monitor the feeds- someone listening in real time (unlikely), someone spot checking random people from random times (unlikely), someone employed to just carry out this monitoring (unlikely), risking breaking the law to hear a bit of gossip (unlikely).

Ah, well that's different. There are plenty of examples of tech spying on us - my security cameras are apparently uploading my data. Sigh.

But to think, as op does, that your employer, and fellow colleagues, are actively monitoring audio (ie not when you are in the meeting and forget to mute) then listening back to it in order to gaslight you with references to mundane crap. That's pretty likely paranoia.

If it was a stalker type person (possible), they wouldn't be sharing it with colleagues.

If it was work policy, why would they bother? Risk - huge - benefit - miniscule. Time and effort required - huge.

It's not on work premises, where cctv might be used for example.

Op suggests a deliberate targetting. That's not the same as 'my alexa listens to me'. It's more like 'someone I know/the government/my employer has hacked my alexa in order to listen specifically to me'.

If you've ever spoken to people with paranoid delusions, that is the kind of thing they say.

@ArcticSkewer I was questioning whether software exists to monitor and filter audio from employees. I know it's possible from my line of work but wanted to see if it was widely used. I was surprised to learn about keystroke logging a few years ago and chatgpt has opened up a whole new area of tech but as a lot of people mentioned gdpr and other restrictions make it unlikely
Fair enough though if you want to write it off and all people who think it is possible for a device to log audio when they are not in a meeting have a mental disorder. I guess I should put on my tinfoil hat and head off to the local mental health unit...

Quit honestly if you only learned about keylogging software a few years ago and you claim this type of software exists in your line of work, yet here you are with quite obviously a poor understanding of technology Your pretty piss poor at your line of work in tech.

One question why would your employer invest £££££ in this technology and risk the legal implications of it. The cost to implement it, maintain, monitor and risk to company reputation and legal implications to all involved if it became common knowledge would be utterly huge and for what? So you boss can listen to your mundane gossip.

Yes you need a bigger tin foil hat.

Thanks for your input k
@Sockloon Ill get a bigger tinfoil hat and quit my job as I'm obviously so awful at it....
As I said I was checking if such software was widely used. Writing off questions about the capabilites of technology and general use as madness seems a bit extreme. Are you OK?

Working from home with a company managed laptop ....
a microphone kill switch really should be more widely available

There is one. It's called shutting the laptop when not using it for work.

I dunno how keylogging software would be legit, given all the passwords we have to type into different systems (legit for work). Plus the sometimes confid. data we handle. It'd be an almighty task to filter thru all the keystrokes I suppose to find the pwds among them.

Yes, I'm okay thanks for asking 😂. Because I actually know what I'm talking about, my router is run through a mini pc with pfSense, I can monitor all inbound and outbound packets and data ports.

So enjoy your limited knowledge filled tin hat trip. Keep listening to the loons and no it's not about writing off questions about tech it's about understanding tech and filtering paranoid and bollocks from truth. You seem to only like people who agree with your paranoia, well enjoy well all be listening 🎧

Lljkk "I dunno how keylogging software would be legit"

it's been in use at least 25 years so it's well grounded in law. If you look at packages for employee monitoring, they get more full on every time you see them at business fairs etc.

OP just ignore the people tin foil hatting about what they think about tin foil hatters. What do you think you'll do about your situation?

but how does that work, key logging, when my password has to be ultra secure shared with no one ever, and yet sometimes I have to supply it freshly mid-session, and each organisation I log into (other professional partner databases) has same terms of use, about no one else must know this pwd.

I'm having a "Does not compute" moment.

Can the IT dept override the password anyway?

I imagine the monitoring software is considered more important than password security, because the software is something the company choose to run themselves?

or, does the monitoring software only start once you've logged in maybe?

Presumably the reason your password has to be kept super secure (I mean it's good practice to never tell anyone anyway but guessing they reiterate this due to the kind of work you do?) is to protect the organisations info and data; why would they then use their key logging capability (should they even have it) to extrapolate this? They'd just be harming themselves if it was shared and if you're using their equipment etc they would be able to access anything anyway. The real issue with key loggers is if they're installed maliciously by a hostile party to be honest.

Tbf OP, you have a go at @Sockloon and @ArcticSkewer but in your original post you specifically suggest that you believe this is happening to you...

It's one thing for a SysAdmin to have the ability to SU into someone's account to install software for them or review contents of their filestore. But that's different from having a vast dataset of every keystroke (who can even store much less process all that??) including in the middle of it, passwords to all sorts of other systems including ones off site.

Suppose my employer encourages me to use social media, tweet out some achievements in my team, from my personal twitter account, tagging my employer & partner groups. I legit login to twitter to do this from work machine. Then someone hacks the keystroke dataset, gets my Twitter name & password, logs into my twitter account, impersonates me endorsing something illegal.

Can I sue my employer for their breach of security leading to my personal reputation damage? Why not?