Bossware: The Hidden Uses of Employee Surveillance Tools

In the past, workplace surveillance just amounted to your boss hovering over your desk. However, in recent years, employee surveillance tools, known as “bossware,” have become more common.

In 2024, CBS News reported that 80% of companies with remote workers were using some kind of bossware to monitor their employees.

Rob Reich, a professor of political science at Stanford and the co-author of “System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot,” told The New York Times that over the past few years, “AI has helped to create a greater opportunity for omnipresent surveillance of workers.”

Employers use various methods to track their workers. Many companies monitor employees’ keystrokes or mouse movements, while others take screenshots of workers’ screens or time their pauses.

HR expert Rob Wilson told CBS News that one company is even using “a lightweight pillow that you have to sit on that tracks your weight,” so bosses will know when workers aren’t at their desks. 1

In April 2026, Meta announced that it would be tracking the way employees work to help train AI models. As part of these training initiatives, the company will be monitoring its workers’ keystrokes and mouse movements.

The tool Meta plans to use, which is called Model Capability Initiative (MCI), will run on work-related apps and websites and periodically take screenshots of employees’ computers. According to an internal memo, tracked work activity will train AI models in areas where they struggle to replicate humans, such as selecting dropdown menus and using keyboard shortcuts.

In an interview with the BBC, a Meta spokesperson said AI models “need real examples of how people actually use” software tools in order to be useful. He went on to state that the data “is not used for any other purpose,” adding that the tool has “safeguards in place to protect sensitive content.”

Tech companies’ increasing investment in AI

Meta has been heavily investing in AI, with the company planning to spend between $125 and $145 billion on it this year. Along with letting thousands of employees go, Meta is also moving about 7,000 workers to new AI-focused roles.

The social media giant isn’t the only company cutting back on staff to fuel AI ventures. Fortune reported that fintech firm Block and social media company Snap also laid off workers, with both citing AI as the reason.

Although there haven’t been reports of those firms tracking employees in the same way that Meta is, companies across the tech and gig economy are increasingly relying on workers to help train AI systems. Gig apps like DoorDash are reportedly paying their workers to train AIs, and many transcription firms are asking workers to review and annotate AI-generated transcripts.

Despite Meta’s claims that the data they’re gathering is strictly for AI training, many of the company’s workers are concerned. Meta laid off 2,000 people in early 2026, and as of May, a fresh wave of layoffs is underway.

Meta began sending layoff emails to roughly 10% of its workforce on May 20, with CNBC reporting that 8,000 jobs have been cut. These layoffs came roughly one month after the company began tracking employees’ workplace activity.

Mark Zuckerberg told employees in a memo in May 2026 that the layoffs are necessary because “success isn’t a given” in the increasingly AI-driven market. There are also reports that the company is planning additional big cuts later this year.

According to Reuters, Meta has been pushing staff to use AI agents for coding and other tasks, even if it slows them down in the short term. The company wants AI agents to operate with limited human oversight.

How employees are responding

While Meta spokesperson Andy Stone told Reuters that the data gathered from employee tracking won’t be used to assess who gets fired, the company wants AI tools to perform many of the tasks human workers currently do.

As a result, many employees are questioning whether their data is being used to make them redundant.

One anonymous Meta employee told the BBC that having all their actions scanned to train AI models amidst a slew of layoffs feels “very dystopian.” 2 In another internal memo, a different disgruntled employee told Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, that the company’s “callousness to the concerns of your own employees is concerning.” 3

Users on Reddit were equally disgruntled. In a recent post on the r/Futurology subreddit, one user stated that Meta “is getting rid of everyone it can with AI, and using the rest to train their AI replacements.”

Another user questioned why the company would bother tracking “random mouse movements and keystrokes” instead of getting training data from “API layers, OS function calls, network traffic, or other more direct forms of digital work.”

Although using bossware to track employees is legal in the US, experts argue that these technologies have pitfalls for workers.

For starters, bossware can cause employees to work much harder and faster than normal. While that might sound good to employers, it can cause psychological turmoil for those workers.

Laura Padin, a lawyer and director at the workers’ rights nonprofit National Employment Law Project, told The New York Times that pushing people to work harder may also present “serious health and safety risks for workers,” including potential physical injury. 4

Sharing the data with third parties

Another major concern for employees is whether the data their bosses gather about them is secure. According to a new study from Columbia Law School, many of the tools that bosses use to monitor employees share data with digital advertising platforms and data brokers.

The researchers found that the surveillance tools they analyzed shared employees’ names, emails, and companies, along with information about their online activities, including their IP addresses and the web pages they visited.

Stephanie Nguyen, senior fellow at Columbia Law School’s Center for Law and lead author of the study, told The Verge that every platform they studied shared employee data with third parties. “The striking piece of this study is that every single platform, nine of nine bossware companies, shared worker data with outside companies. Every single one,” she said. “That blew me away.”

Three of the nine platforms the researchers examined were also able to track workers’ precise locations, even when the app was running in the background.

Even if the data gathered isn’t shared with third parties, it could be used to make potentially discriminatory decisions or incorrect assumptions about employees. For example, the researchers said that the data could inaccurately infer details about workers’ health and fitness by tracking their activity.

As mentioned, there are no laws in the US that prevent companies from monitoring their employees with bossware. In a few other countries, it’s a very different story.

Italy explicitly prohibits companies from electronically tracking their employees. In Germany, employers can only track workers’ keystrokes in exceptional circumstances, such as if an employee is suspected of committing a serious crime.

Ifeoma Ajunwa, a ⁠law professor at Yale University, told Reuters that federally, “there is no limit on worker surveillance.” However, she did add that state-level laws require employers to broadly notify employees when they’re being monitored. 5

For now, Meta’s remaining employees in the US are forced to contend with the company’s new AI-driven tracking initiatives whether they like it or not. But the researchers of Columbia University’s study want to push for more legislation to protect workers. They’re urging state and federal lawmakers to evaluate whether collecting workers’ data violates existing state privacy laws or unfair practice laws, especially if the information is sold on to third parties.

Even if governments put guardrails in place, the AI arms race shows no signs of slowing. Companies will continue investing in AI-driven initiatives, and they’ll need plenty of data to do so. It’s likely that this kind of employee tracking will become more common, not less, in the years to come.