#surveillance

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.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2025/10/22/microsoft-teams-starts-telling-your-company-if-youre-not-at-work/

I was skeptical about the 8 hour office hours before, until I got a warning.

People on this forum also warn about activities been tracked, I did not believe it.

Well today , there was a general email about activities been monitored.
Say you go for doctors appt for 2 hours, when you are back you have to spend extra 2 hours.

In summary, your total online activity must be close to 8 hours.

Effective immediately, you will be chained to your desks upon arrival to work. Please plan your wardrobe appropriately to accommodate this change. Upon completion of your work day, please ensure your manager approves your work as being complete for the day so you may be unchained from your desk. You will be given exactly 5 minutes to walk from your desk to your transportation. If you need additional time, you will need a doctor’s note explaining why. Failure to comply will result in you being referred to HR and written up. Please note all bathroom breaks, lunch breaks, or desk-side chats not pertaining to work-related activities will be deducted from your total work time for the day, so plan accordingly.

Further, in addition to the surveillance software already installed on your computing devices that track and read your every typed word and mouse click, we are now introducing new surveillance hardware and software to our environment. There will now be surveillance cameras installed in all cubicles, offices, and conference rooms. There will also be new, state of the art thought monitoring hardware and software installed.

If you are found to have spoken about or thought about layoffs, talking to the media about layoffs, how poorly you are treated at work, updating your resume, interviewing for jobs outside of the firm, or any other matters outside of your work for Stifel, you will be referred to HR and written up.

Last, anyone at the director level or above will be issued a whip. Should your work performance become unsatisfactory, you will be summarily whipped and beaten until you come into compliance with workplace standards. Should you require this beating to be handled privately, a psychiatrist’s note will be required. A woodshed is being built to accommodate this requirement.

Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter, and please remember what a privilege it is to work for such a great employer.

PS. If you've read this far, this post is sarcasm and is in response to the "ATTN STIFEL EMPLOYEES" post that was from yesterday. Enjoy, and have a nice day.

A good friend of mine who has inside knowledge shared with me that your company is now 100% monitored.

It's a contracted service, and they are to monitor everything. The threshold for flagging and reporting is at the lowest bar. The service started in October and the service continues to March 2026.

I'm not sure why the sudden mistrust, but it's disturbing to be working under a microscope.

What is the purpose of this?

My source said that I should share with my trusted coworkers, but I don't even know who I can trust anymore.

Just got back from Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. Some of our technology execs were there. New tracking software and authentication software will be rolling out soon. In a nutshell, every device we use for work will have tracking and timestamping abilities.
Don’t get me started with how they’ll be using AI in the company.

My understanding is there are two Reports
1) Days in office - Badge swipes.
-some buildings do not have a building exit point.

 - Badge point is not sopisticated enough to log a time, only date? 
    Why is it nessisary for them to sift through thousands of IPs/machine names to   determine 'time in office'?  previously they were only checking for where an emplyess was logged in if they wanted to scrutinize the emploee.

2) Hours in office - network IP and user login

• many emplyees share a computer. one user could be logged in over night.
  • Considering that may employees share a computer the logged in user or lan id needs to be determined. How is that being done? Probaby by the spyware.

I belive two major flaws exist:
They are sitting on a metric ton of data.
No way to pull meaning reports due to inaccurant data.

So many flaws in these reporting methods. It almost begs to gamed.

I am new to this organization. Is mouse or activity tracking usual in a senior claims role?

Does Verint still get used to monitor employees? If so, is that for everybody or just certain roles and areas?

I see it running on my laptop. But it’s never been brought up to me before in any discussions. Just curious.

I’ve noticed some people seem to have a lot of flexibility like taking walks, longer lunch breaks to go to the gym, playing pool, or spending time on their phones. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, it’s great they have that balance but I’m just curious how that works here. Does our company track productivity in any specific way?

What tools is Truist using to keep an eye on what employees are doing on Truist laptops? Some departments have Sapience, but I've heard there are other tools being utilized. Anyone know what else is being used and which departments are using them?

A reminder for those waiting for the next CES. Your feedback is being collected in realtime. Employees sentiment is monitored by Aware, an AI service that monitors internal dialogue.
If you were wondering why the CES seems diluted, it is because they already have the data they need

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/02/09/ai-might-be-reading-your-slack-teams-messages-using-tech-from-aware.html

All the signs are there, new badges , new VPN! We are watching you….

Is Gong.ai used by ELT for layoffs?

what about our private phones that have the Meraki stack installed?

always on surveillance?

Verint is the vendor, they track activity while logged into the network. Not all departments have this, most do not. That probably will change at some point.

Essentially it measures activity, idle and inactive time as well as time in applications. Some activities can be flagged, like people that write a book in MS Word by putting a coffee cup on their keyboard, mouse jigglers, etc. Uncertain about putting yourself in a Teams call meeting or other ways to trick the system.

Check your entitlements for Verint and if you have it, assume your clicks are being tracked in addition to network login and out activity. Again, I assume everyone will have it at some point, but you probably don’t as of now.