#surveillance

New software has been uploaded to all Molina Hourly employees computers that monitors everything you do and sends reports to upper management. Stay productive don't let your idle time add up. This is definitely going to be used to reduce the workforce.

If anyone here is providing information or screenshots to James Faris at Business Insider, be cautious!

I’ve heard from my VP who knows the identity of one of the informants that they’re watching them and waiting for them to slip up again. I'm told their IP address, document download timings, and personal email logins have all been tracked. They’re waiting to take action and may fire them for gross misconduct.

To James Faris, I know you're probably reading this forum and LinkedIn, cause you reached out there - It’s probably becoming clear why the comms team isn’t supplying you with any quotes for your stories, but some of your informants might lose their jobs.

Antropic said the dod couldn’t use their systems to spy on US citizens. OpenAI picked up the dod contract.
So how do US TikTok users feel about their data now on Oracle servers now?
How long before AI is spying on employees?

RTO is absolute insanity. I have 10 people on my team. None of us are in the same state outside of two people in Texas who aren't in the same city. We have to go back to the office, surrounded by employees we dont work with or collaborate with in any way, so we can join the same remote teams meetings we would while home. Now I find out from someone in cyber security that they are monitoring our key strokes, web searches and Microsoft apps.

RTO was about the executives leveraging their control over one of the few bright spots we had working here, flexibility.

Does anyone know if managers can see times we come in and how many hours we are in each day?

Leg T surplus is coming but first they are trying to fire you for misuse of company time. They have a usage report for websites and a list of people that are not working. The goal is to fire 20- it will save the company over 2 million dollars.

Be warned they are firing people like crazy for not wrapping on orders. AI is reporting this daily to management.

Are they only on meeting surveillance and maybe PowerPoint deck duty? I've never seen them do anything more than be surveillance on Teams meetings, and fly into other offices to be surveillance in person. Why do we need so many levels of surveillance? Can someone observe their teams and find out if they are doing something more than just sitting there?

What are your thoughts about workplace technology analytics being rolled out? What is that?

Walk into any corporate office, and you’ll hear the same anxious conversation: Will AI eliminate white-collar jobs?

The optimists insist that new jobs will emerge to replace the ones we lose—after all, it has happened in previous tech revolutions. Pragmatists argue the workforce will simply become more productive with artificial intelligence, creating more value with minimal job cuts. And the pessimists fear entry-level knowledge workers will become obsolete altogether.

But this debate misses a crucial dynamic. Right now, workers are potentially training AI how to make them obsolete. And they often don’t realize it.

The kind of AI used by companies, called an enterprise AI system, can capture everything you do at work and use that information to train itself. These systems can record your interactions within the platform—the prompts you write, the documents you create, the queries you run.

In other words, the company can potentially track—and claim ownership of—every keystroke you make within the system, every idea you document there, every tool you build using that platform. It can identify what approaches worked best, what email language got responses and how you approached those clients. And all that knowledge can become part of the company AI, so it may eventually know, down to increasingly fine details, how you do your job.

Then comes the dangerous part for employees: The AI can pass that information along to anybody else who does your job, or in some cases just do the job itself. Over time, you could become a lot less valuable to your employer—and a lot more replaceable.

This dynamic may fundamentally change the relationship between employer and employee. The stakes are so high and so urgent that both sides are rushing to position (or protect) themselves. Executives are rapidly implementing enterprise AI systems, seeking productivity gains and competitive advantage—and they often aren’t disclosing the implications for job security and privacy. Meanwhile, at least some employees are secretly adopting personal AI tools, sometimes violating corporate policies, so that their employers can’t capture everything they know and do.
Capturing the essence

To understand what’s coming, you need to understand what enterprise AI systems actually are. These are different from the interfaces you use at home. Enterprise AI systems are platforms that integrate directly into corporate workflows—think of Microsoft Copilot embedded in Word, Excel and Outlook, or Salesforce’s Einstein AI woven into customer-relationship management. These systems sit inside the tools where you already work. And they can potentially capture much of your work within the platform, learning from many interactions, and embedding that knowledge into company-owned infrastructure.

What once lived only in employees’ heads, built through years of experience and hard-won expertise, is increasingly being institutionalized in real time. When you leave, at least some of your knowledge stays behind, embedded in systems that will be used by the AI and by your replacement (if a replacement is needed at all).

Imagine that you’re a senior software engineer debugging a system crash. You run a bunch of tests to figure out the problem, and when you discover the solution isn’t in the documentation, you develop a novel workaround. You share the solution with the company, obviously, but the expertise and techniques that you brought to the problem were all yours, in a fundamental way. You figured out the workaround because of what you know and how you work.
That is the way things used to be, anyway. When you do your work through enterprise AI, though, the system doesn’t just record your solution. It can capture your problem-solving approach: which questions you asked first, how you refined the search when initial attempts failed, potentially even the logical steps that led you from symptom to cause. The next time junior engineers face a similar crash, the system may be able to guide them through elements of the methodology you used.

You haven’t lost your expertise. But now the employer also has access to key aspects of that expertise, in a form it controls and can deploy to other employees without you. It has a partial blueprint for how you think, and some of the knowledge that once made you indispensable is now a reproducible company asset.
Making it personal

These revolutionary changes seem to put workers in a tight spot. But I believe employees have an alternative—one that isn’t easy, but could help move the power dynamic back in their favor. Specifically: Employees should consider avoiding their company AI systems when possible and use personal AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot or dozens of others.

These tools operate on completely different terms than enterprise AI. You access them directly. You own your prompts, your workflows, your customizations. The knowledge you create stays with you. Most critically, when you walk out the door, your AI-enhanced capabilities walk with you.

Maybe you’re required to use your company’s enterprise AI for client work. But all the strategic thinking you do before engaging with clients? Develop that using personal AI tools.

I spoke with a regional vice president at an energy company who does exactly that: He uses his firm’s enterprise system for required compliance and documentation, but develops new analytical approaches and tests complex decisions in personal AI tools. The novel insights stay his.
What can be done?

Using personal AI tools is just the first step employees should take, however. To really change the power dynamic, they can act on other fronts.

• Negotiate upfront. When joining a company, people should treat access to AI tools like intellectual-property ownership. Most employment agreements cover IP created on the job, but employees should dig further into a company’s policies before signing on: What gets captured through enterprise AI? How long is that data retained? Can you use personal AI tools for skill development? Can you request deletion of your contributions if you leave?

Most companies haven’t thought through these questions yet, which means there is room to establish reasonable boundaries before you’re locked in.

• Support collective action. Individual opt-out of AI is often impossible, so unions and professional associations need to pay attention. With collective bargaining, workers could demand transparency about the use of enterprise AI and demand fair compensation for the knowledge it gathers. Without collective power, individual employees will keep clicking “accept” on agreements that restructure their jobs simply because they have no alternative.

Concerted employee action may start to change the AI calculus. Employers may find that enterprise AI systems do capture knowledge, but at a steep cost: They may drive away the most talented employees, ones who realize they can build more valuable, portable capabilities with personal tools.

AI is breaking the traditional model of employment in real time faster than anyone realizes. The companies and employees who understand these dynamics will position themselves to capture AI’s benefits. Those who don’t may find themselves on the losing side of the biggest workplace shift in a generation.

Just trust what this leadership team tells you. Look past the quarter-zip smiles and forced enthusiasm and you will see a mountain of corporate spin. CP called out “incredible collaboration” this week...People at desks were not collaborating they were talking about how bad this place has become and looking to duck when you walk by. At least two leaders on this panel are openly planning their exits and they are not invested in fixing anything.... like you they want out. Watch the clown show from yesterday if you think that translates into work-life balance for you ask yourself why. Here’s what this really means for you. Every keystroke is tracked. Independent thinking is gone even when you are right, you follow “Crown math.” Your work feeds leadership payouts, not long term stability. This ends the same way it always does. Leadership cashes out and another company gets stripped down. You deal with the fallout masked as 'goals' and “Clear” and “transparent” are just words here like PURPLE was... how'd that go. Their face and actions tell a different story. I have only 1 question. Are you listening to what they say, or watching what they do? Just look at each face even they can no longer play the game. Shame

Do not access this website while connected to the guest WiFi in the office! They’ve begun to track usage back to your phone’s IP address.

I came across this article recently that Microsoft Teams will soon be able to track worker locations by their phone if it is installed. The new feature was due to be released in January but was delayed to this March.

I thought the timing was interesting since we were originally due back in the office 4 days a week in January but it was pushed back to March. Could be a coincidence but I wanted to share this so people aren't surprised when MS Teams begins to share your location 24/7 with WFC.

https://cybernews.com/tech/microsoft-teams-employee-tracking-feature-delay-managers-look-forward/

We know you're watching

Supervisors can see when direct reports are not in the office. Are they able to see the time the employee badge in and out of the building too?

Disappointed in the firm. Not only was I reimagined , received a demotion and changed from salary to hourly, but that put me into a category where my merit raise is about 1% and bonuses are half of what I used to get . Not to mention the force back to office 4 days a week, tracking your location when you open up documents. Since when did this turn into highschool?
Why is this happening? I have been at the firm a long time. Nothing like this has ever happened. So much for work life balance

heading to market basket than to get gas with out punching out , when i get back maybe play some solitaire on the company website , their go Onsemi go look at everyones company computer do a search lol. oh boy what u will find

Spotted: a once-mighty corporate empire teetering on the edge of its own contradictions. After sweeping layoffs, the remaining employees are left juggling heavier workloads, thinner resources, and a shiny new “way of working” that—surprise—just isn’t working. The halls whisper of burnout, while inboxes scream urgency, and morale quietly slips through the cracks. Efficiency? Innovation? Collaboration? Please. When survival mode becomes the daily dress code, even the most loyal insiders start wondering if leadership is actually watching… or just missing the point entirely.

And now comes the latest twist: employee tracking. Yes, tracking. As if productivity can be measured by the minute hand of a clock and not the brilliance of a mind. Word on the floor is that time spent in the office will soon be monitored like wildlife in a nature documentary, proving once and for all that leadership’s priorities are spectacularly backwards. Because nothing says “we trust you” like surveillance, right? If they truly believe that counting hours instead of cultivating culture will spark performance, then someone clearly skipped the memo on modern work.

I've heard from several corp. colleagues that this movo company has been contracted by 3M. Here's the website: https://movo.co/

If so, this would mean all trust is gone.

Can someone comment if this is true?

Layoffs confirmed in surveillance coming in February

This question was asked a few times in this forum.

• Yes, companies have started tracking "how long" instead of just "if" people badged in.
• The sensors were there, but aggregation was not so common .. till now.
• https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-flags-employees-rto-office-2026-1

Hybrid Creep ! We had WFH. We had RTO. Now, meet "hybrid creep," - The idea is that a combination of carrots and sticks will encourage people to gradually increase their in-office time without explicitly telling them to do so. That means tactics like basing promotions on office attendance, or increasing surveillance of employees or Increasing layoffs.
There’s a meaningful difference between saying “we believe we’re better together” and secretly counting phones in a building.

• One is a point of view, whether it’s right or wrong.
• The other is surveillance dressed up as management.
  Don’t be surprised if corporate culture collapses when leaders stop trusting adults to behave like adults.
  The combination of factors seems to be working: Office attendance rates are rising steadily, even as many firms take a step back from mandates.
  https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/workplace/hybrid-work-return-to-office-creep-af5a62b5

We're all excited for $6 chickens and looking forward to a protein-packed new year.
Spy cameras have been installed in working areas.
PIPs on the table, get ready for another inconsistent.
5-day RTO seems to be the biggest circulating rumor?
Anyone think there's a real possibility of leg irons at the desks?

For employees who have an ID badge with a chip, does WF use it to track their location?

This is a theory. They implemented this new bag check policy the same week that DM's emphasized on the weekly conference call how SM's have to be working 8-5 (no matter your store hours) while also emphasizing how they're tracking bags checks full force. I'm curious if the bag checks are actually being implemented to track what time the SM's are leaving their shifts. This would give corporate leadership the advantage to make ER easily give the OK to terminate SM's after the holiday to avoid severance for (theory) layoffs after R2R. Just a theory. What are your thoughts?

Forget the LAN/VPN tracking, forget the Presence Report, forget the badge swipes...we are now being tracked on how many Teams meetings we have and are also attending.

Have a Teams meeting with a large group and you and your boss/team all go into a teleconference room? Guess what...make sure to log in to the meeting so you don't get dinged for not participating. L3 and up will begin adding a lot more Teams meetings for things they used to just walk over and ask someone or ping them. This is a new metric for productivity.

What a hellscape being managed by HR re--rds and Re--rd-in-Chief Stankey

Coming in 2026 ....

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2025/11/30/this-is-when-microsoft-starts-telling-your-boss-if-youre-not-at-work/

So many people have been discussing activity tracking (not badge in and out) but what exactly does it entail? Surely it can't just be how many emails you send or read or the time spent on apps?
If I run a script or load a page and it takes, say, a minute, and I don't do anything else in that minute, is that a minute if inactivity?

does anyone know if RTO hour are being tracked/days in office? Will it affect our bonus this year?

Zero field techs are optimistic about their future at Ncratleos. Currently it being the 4th quarter now isn't the time to leave but the grumbling and rumbling has commenced. No one in the field wants a camera in the cab and none of ncr management cares what they think. Will there be a mass of techs leaving in the near future? Only time will tell.

The work laptops have tracking software running on them.

It logs things like:

• keystrokes
• emails sent
• time online

This information is being sent to HR for productivity reporting.

What is the goal besides layoffs? Any insights?

Does it show that you’re not at assigned location if you take a meeting from another building but you’re at your assigned building for most of the day? Im in Minneapolis towers and sometimes asked to attend meetings from the other building downtown.

I had my first meeting about this yesterday, and I’m here to tell you that it’s very real. My manager reported my average active hours over a period of time and my team’s average active hours for comparison. Since this was the first meeting, no guidance was given on what to do/not do based on my numbers.

What isn’t clear, and wasn’t provided to me despite asking, is exactly what activity is being captured, but based on the numbers, I have to presume it’s some combination of engaging with applications and being active on Teams calls. Ironically, what wasn’t captured was the quality of my work during the same time period. And before any assumptions are made, my role is fairly senior. I’ve been with Wells for a long time; I’m not in a call center or ops type position. I can’t be any more specific than that without risking anonymity.

So yeah, this is the next phase.

Hey RTO folks - Anyone noticing their location being tracked via Teams now?

In this thread we talk about how Corpo is spying on you. I'll start:

• FortiClient
• SentinelOne
• SentinelOne plugin for browsers
• ZScaler (even when it's Off) - fun fact, this website is banned!
• LinkedIn "compliance" - yes, they're going through the information on the LinkedIn profiles - both FTE and Contractors

Your position is checked for potential removal based on your usage of internal AI tools.
Use wisely.

In case you weren't aware, they're also looking at activity levels-- So now they're expecting you to click and email and teams and what the f**k else they're looking at to complain about you. And naturally nothing has been communicated, you know know how they measure or what they measure.

F this company.

I sent several legitimate personal documents to my own email today and noticed something in my Mac Finder under “locations” I’ve never seen before.

Under iCloud Drive and OneDrive, there was a network icon titled “my first name” in all lowercase

Spooky

Earlier this year, a developer was shocked by a message that appeared on his personal phone: “Apple detected a targeted mercenary spyware attack against your iPhone.”

“I was panicking,” Jay Gibson, who asked that we don’t use his real name over fears of retaliation, told TechCrunch.

Gibson, who until recently built surveillance technologies for Western government hacking tools maker Trenchant, may be the first documented case of someone who builds exploits and spyware being themselves targeted with spyware.

“What the he-l is going on? I really didn’t know what to think of it,” said Gibson, adding that he turned off his phone and put it away on that day, March 5. “I went immediately to buy a new phone. I called my dad. It was a mess. It was a huge mess.”

At Trenchant, Gibson worked on developing iOS zero-days, meaning finding vulnerabilities and developing tools capable of exploiting them that are not known to the vendor who makes the affected hardware or software, such as Apple.

“I have mixed feelings of how pathetic this is, and then extreme fear because once things hit this level, you never know what’s going to happen,” he told TechCrunch.

But the ex-Trenchant employee may not be the only exploit developer targeted with spyware. According to three sources who have direct knowledge of these cases, there have been other spyware and exploit developers in the last few months who have received notifications from Apple alerting them that they were targeted with spyware.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment from TechCrunch.

The targeting of Gibson’s iPhone shows that the proliferation of zero-days and spyware is starting to ensnare more types of victims.

Spyware and zero-day makers have historically claimed their tools are only deployed by vetted government customers against criminals and te------ts. But for the past decade, researchers at the University of Toronto’s digital rights group Citizen Lab, Amnesty International, and other organizations have found dozens of cases where governments used these tools to target dissidents, journalists, human rights defenders, and political rivals all over the world.

The closest public cases of security researchers being targeted by hackers happened in 2021 and 2023, when North Korean government hackers were caught targeting security researchers working in vulnerability research and development.

Two days after receiving the Apple threat notification, Gibson contacted a forensic expert who has extensive experience investigating spyware attacks. After performing an initial analysis of Gibson’s phone, the expert did not find any signs of infection, but still recommended a deeper forensic analysis of the exploit developer’s phone.

A forensic analysis would have entailed sending the expert a complete backup of the device, something Gibson said he was not comfortable with.

“Recent cases are getting tougher forensically, and some we find nothing on. It may also be that the attack was not actually fully sent after the initial stages, we don’t know,” the expert told TechCrunch.

Without a full forensic analysis of Gibson’s phone, ideally one where investigators found traces of the spyware and who made it, it’s impossible to know why he was targeted or who targeted him.

But Gibson told TechCrunch that he believes the threat notification he received from Apple is connected to the circumstances of his departure from Trenchant, where he claims the company designated him as a scapegoat for a damaging leak of internal tools.

Apple sends out threat notifications specifically for when it has evidence that a person was targeted by a mercenary spyware attack. This kind of surveillance technology is often invisibly and remotely planted on someone’s phone without their knowledge by exploiting vulnerabilities in the phone’s software, exploits that can be worth millions of dollars and can take months to develop. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies typically have the legal authority to deploy spyware on targets, not the spyware makers themselves.

Sara Banda, a spokesperson for Trenchant’s parent company L3Harris, declined to comment for this story when reached by TechCrunch before publication.

A month before he received Apple’s threat notification, when Gibson was still working at Trenchant, he said he was invited to go to the company’s London office for a team-building event.

When Gibson arrived on February 3, he was immediately summoned into a meeting room to speak via video call with Peter Williams, Trenchant’s then-general manager who was known inside the company as “Doogie.” (In 2018, defense contractor L3Harris acquired zero-day makers Azimuth and Linchpin Labs, two sister startups that merged to become Trenchant.)

Williams told Gibson the company suspected he was double employed and was thus suspending him. All of Gibson’s work devices would be confiscated and analyzed as part of an internal investigation into the allegations. Williams could not be reached for comment.

“I was in shock. I didn’t really know how to react because I couldn’t really believe what I was hearing,” said Gibson, who explained that a Trenchant IT employee then went to his apartment to pick up his company-issued equipment.

Around two weeks later, Gibson said Williams called and told him that following the investigation, the company was firing him and offering him a settlement agreement and payment. Gibson said Williams declined to explain what the forensic analysis of his devices had found, and essentially told him he had no choice but to sign the agreement and depart the company.

Feeling like he had no alternative, Gibson said he went along with the offer and signed.

Gibson told TechCrunch he later heard from former colleagues that Trenchant suspected he had leaked some unknown vulnerabilities in Google’s Chrome browser, tools that Trenchant had developed. Gibson, and three former colleagues of his, however, told TechCrunch he did not have access to Trenchant’s Chrome zero-days, given that he was part of the team exclusively developing iOS zero-days and spyware. Trenchant teams only have strictly compartmentalized access to tools related to the platforms they are working on, the people said.

“I know I was a scapegoat. I wasn’t guilty. It’s very simple,” said Gibson. “I didn’t do absolutely anything other than working my a-s off for them.”

The story of the accusations against Gibson and his subsequent suspension and firing was independently corroborated by three former Trenchant employees with knowledge.

Two of the other former Trenchant employees said they knew details of Gibson’s London trip and were aware of suspected leaks of sensitive company tools.

All of them asked not to be named but believe Trenchant got it wrong.