About

Fifty notes on computer activity monitoring, written from the side being watched.

Who it is for

Anybody whose computer is monitored at work and is not sure what that means.

Also parents deciding whether to monitor a child, which is a genuinely different question, and anybody tracking their own time.

The position

Monitoring is rarely what either side thinks. Employees believe more is collected than is; employers believe the figures say more about work than they do.

Almost everything you want to know can be asked, and in most places they are obliged to answer.

Whose device it is settles most questions, and the two boundaries worth keeping cost nothing.

The line this collection holds

It explains what is collected, how to find out, what the rights you have are, and what to do when monitoring is used unfairly.

It does not explain how to defeat, disable, conceal from or falsify monitoring.

Instructions for evading monitoring do not help the person being measured unfairly — their remedies are information, rights, a record and a conversation, all of which are here. They help the person who is actually doing something they should not.

And practically: attempting to defeat monitoring on an employer's device is usually a disciplinary matter in itself, and it forfeits every argument about proportionality you might otherwise have made.

What is deliberately absent

Product and vendor names.

Figures for how many organisations monitor, which come from surveys commissioned by people selling the software.

Nothing here is legal advice

Rules on workplace monitoring differ substantially by jurisdiction and are moving.

About this domain

This address previously carried several hundred streaming workaround pages, which have been removed. There is a page about that.