If you enjoy the comfort of a white-collar job, you may be stunned to learn just how much you are being watched. Surveillance is rising because work-from-home policies mean that employers are keen to keep tabs on their remote workforce. Before the pandemic, around one in ten of the large businesses asked by Gartner, a research firm, had spying software. Within three years it expects the share to reach 70％.

Bosses also have ever-expanding amounts of data at their disposal, enlarging the digital footprint that can be monitored. Widely used software such as Google Workspace or Microsoft Teams can tell managers what time you clock in or how many calls you join on their platforms. The blurring boundaries between work and home mean that video surveillance and other intrusive tools are barging into workers’ personal lives, social-media accounts and private devices at all times of the day.

The law is scrambling to adjust. In the state of New York employees subject to electronic monitoring must be told in advance, under a new law introduced recently. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation establishes some basic rights for staff. Yet it is still early days and the technology is advancing fast. As a result, most firms are only just getting their heads around how much remote work is likely to remain permanent.

There are perfectly legitimate reasons for surveillance at work. Many jobs require monitoring for safety, security and compliance. In the same way that companies collect data on customers’ behaviour in order to improve their products, so employers are using monitoring tools to measure the productivity and engagement of their most important resource: their people.

Yet it is easy to see the pitfalls. There is a long history of those with power abusing those without in the name of compliance and efficiency. In the most extreme cases, 20th-century despots ran vast informant networks, and some slave plantations in America and the West Indies kept tyrannical work records.

Today’s workers are not indentured, obviously. But many studies link excessive individual surveillance to higher levels of stress. And if algorithms trained on biased data are used to make more decisions, the odds of discrimination will rise. One analysis found that AI systems consistently interpret black faces as being angrier than white ones.

What to do? Employers should have a legitimate reason for surveillance. Although the boundary will take time to establish through case law and precedent, this is vital to ensure that monitoring is proportionate. Establishing clear guidelines is not easy, but qualms over the potential abuse of surveillance will grow. It’s time to start drawing some lines.

The author’s attitude toward surveillance at work is one of________.