Apple’s Troublesome (Trial) Cancel Culture

By | July 28, 2020
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Apple, about to report Q3 earnings this week, have quietly changed the rules when it comes to their own services. If you take up its offer a YEAR-long trial for its Apple TV+ product, you better remember to make a note in your calendar to cancel it 364 days hence. Probably not surprising, but certainly irritating, and a reminder of how sneaky their processes can be, given their claims to be focused only on making beautiful objects.

I see a bigger problem, too: when big tech uses its heft to move into something that is not its traditional preserve, it reveals more of itself than perhaps it would like to. When Apple sells you overpriced devices you tend to accept the premium. After all, they’re great products, right? When it gives you Numbers, Pages etc for free, you tend not to grumble. They’re good apps, almost as good as their counterparts from Google and Microsoft. But when it moves the goalposts on its own platform to boost its chances of success for a new service of its own, you have to ask, is this a glimpse into what is really going on behind the scenes?

And this is not a sideshow. After all, revenue from Apple’s services — which includes Apple Pay, Apple Music, iTunes and the App Store—among others— has trebled in the past six years, according to Statista. (Apple’s overall annual revenue since 2014 has risen by 42%, again according to Statista.)

Source: Statista

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2020-07-28 08:53 addendum: And a good point was made by Scott Galloway (h/t Casey Newton) that the whole reason Apple is giving me a year’s free TV+ (and making it hard for me to cancel it easily) is because it’s cross-subsidising from its insanely profitable hardware division in order to add value to that. He would have Congress ask this question: 

Q: Apple TV+ is offering consumers $1 billion in original content for every .80c a month the consumer spends on your Apple TV+ streaming video service. Isn’t it your opportunity to differentiate your $1,300 phones and fund Apple TV+ from the revenues of an unrelated product that allows you to offer a media product at well below cost? In sum, isn’t Apple guilty of “dumping,” that is, buying market share with unfeasibly low prices?

I would add that while, yes, it’s dumping, the main point is to build market share with its service. Apple TV+ isn’t just about selling more hardware, although inevitably it will. It’s about becoming the gatekeeper/platform for all TV and video subscriptions. Apple Music, similarly. It aims to ‘tame’ Netflix and Spotify, respectively. 

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Pestered to sign up for their underwhelming TV+ service, I eventually relented when told I could get it free for a year because I had bought a new iPad (well, refurbished, actually, but who’s counting.)

I signed up easily enough, but then when I received the invoice, I do what I always do if I am not sure I want to renew — I cancelled it.

Or tried to.

Turns out I can’t — well not without losing the trial immediately:

The text reads:

if you cancel, you and your family members will immediately lose access to Apple TV+ and the remainder of your 1 year free trial. You cannot reactivate this trial.

(Interestingly you can’t copy the text as text, something that’s true across the whole iTunes (MacOS) app. I suppose this is to deter scraping, but it’s not consistent with other MacOs apps, and is detrimental to the user experience.)

Turns out, this is something they do with Apple Music too: It says very explicitly on this page that

If you cancel during a trial period, you might lose access to content immediately.

In some ways this makes sense. They’re not going to continue giving stuff away if you have no intention of paying for it. But the next sentence highlights how poor this is in terms of customer rights and principles:

If you signed up for a free or discounted trial subscription and you don’t want to renew it, cancel it at least 24 hours before the trial ends.

In other words — you need to keep a very good record of when your trial is going to expire, and if you’ve decided you’re going to let it lapse, you need to remember to cancel it just before it expires.

I have a few questions:

Is this new?

On the first count, yes, it is. Apple seems to have introduced this at some point in the past year or so. Up until then Apple presented itself as the Caring One, reminding folks to cancel their trial subscriptions before the trial ends. This one from March 2018 in the Internet Archive:

I can’t locate when this page was changed, but it’s some time in the last 18 months.

Certainly the terms and conditions were also changed at some point. This one from 2017 makes no mention of the policy, whereas the current one does.

Do other apps do it?

Apple Music, yes. A Reddit thread from February 2019 claimed something similar happening — probably more egregious, because they had ported all their music preferences over from Spotify only to find access blocked immediately after cancelling the trial. Interestingly, there the discussion points to an official Apple discussion page from February 2018 where a ‘community specialist’ quotes the existing terms, namely

If you cancel during your trial period, you’ll continue to have access to the entire Apple Music catalog until the date that you would have been billed for the full price.

The reddit user said Apple staff kept apologising but couldn’t help him. So it seems that between February 2018 and 2019 policy changed, and no one has updated Apple’s own Communities page.

And there’s a Vice story from 2019 about the generally unpleasant experience users get from trying to extricate themselves from free trials. It recommends users cancel the trial as soon as they sign up to avoid getting stung — something they say can be done with Amazon Prime, Spotify, ESPN+ and CBS All Access. At least of the time of writing the piece. Things might have changed. They certainly have for Apple users.

Is it fair to users?

Well, I’m not a fan of the way Apple (or most companies) handle subscription. Everything seems to be automatic, and there’s rarely warning or an option to discontinue — or to change the level of your subscription, if relevant — before you’re charged. Yes, Apple do allow you to cancel retroactively if you spot it in time, but the only way to know is to check your email for any invoices. I am probably not the only one that notices any ‘invoice’ emails tend to arrive quite a bit after an actual purchase, confusing the reader when they see the title of the email, which is always “Your invoice from Apple” rather than something more informative.

But is it fair? Well, it’s a free trial so they can do what they like. But I suspect consumer watchdogs would have something to say. Does Apple accord other services using their platform the same privilege?

And comparing it with some other services, Google Play Music explicitly states that

You can keep using your subscription until the end of the billing period during which you cancel.

(That said, Google has some practices that are either misleading or onerous in this field. This support page details the experience of several people who found they were signed up for YouTube subscriptions they didn’t want and couldn’t cancel.)

I don’t like any of this. I don’t think users should be hoodwinked into buying something, especially a subscription. The fact that there are videos explaining how to cancel an Apple TV+ subscription, for example, tells me something isn’t right.

Cancelling something should be as easy as signing up for something. The reason people like me cancel a subscription (or trial subscription) as soon as we’ve signed up is because we don’t want to be stung for a payment we didn’t intend to make, and, essentially, because we no longer trust the companies we’re subscribing to. That’s a pretty poor situation. (Especially if you’re a brand that relies 100% on your transparency and credibility.)

So if we’re really going to go down this unbundled subscription XaaS (everything as a Service) route, where we subscribe to lots of different services, from newsletters to our TV watching, then let’s make it as easy to cancel as it is to sign up. In that sense at least, Spotify and Netflix are leading the pack. And look at what Canva do — certainly no longer a minnow, but respectful enough of their users to not charge them on the sly:

But they are still in the role of disrupters rather than incumbents. Once an incumbent, you become a technopoly and can impose your own rules.

Apple: if you want us to like you, make sure that as services become an increasingly important part of your revenue stream, you don’t make us think you are Evil.

Directory of note-taking apps

By | July 20, 2020
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2020-07-20 12:25: Roam has reinvigorated the space of knowledge management apps, enough to inspire me to try to pull together a list of what’s out there. The last directory I did on something like this was A Directory Of Outliners which was in 2004, updated in 2007. Gulp. A lot has changed in the intervening years, and a lot hasn’t. Markdown has definitely made things easier, meaning that raw files can be formatted in a way that is readily understood by other apps, so that document has a life beyond the app, both in terms of longevity but also portability.

This time I’m not going to narrow things down too much. ‘Outliners’ was good shorthand to gather the prevailing dual- and triple-pane view, which is still in many ways the structure. But there are overdue innovations that were visible before in some apps, but have not been applied with such vim as Roam has done — visualization, graphs, easy wiki-style linking, and automatic backlinks (bidirectional links).

I’m not going to be too fancy with this list; you can go crazy trying to compare features and list all the platforms they are available on. All of them could fall into the category of adding notes, organising notes, searching for notes, but may also include features like sharing notes, automatic back-linking. If you’re not sure of some of the background to this revival of interest, I touched on it in a post in May: How A Twitter Scrap, and Covid-19, Reveal a Disruption In Process

To me the value of these tools lies in being able to do as many as possible of the following:

  • allow me to add data easily, whether it’s writing it, dragging stuff in or pointing the app to a folder of existing data
  • allow me to link to other data, elsewhere in the app, outside the app on my computer(s), on the web, and to pages and items that don’t exist yet (i.e. new pages)
  • allow those links to be intelligent. That means bidirectional — if I link to a page, that page knows and shows the link — and visual — I want to be able to learn from those links, to see the links in different ways, and also, where possible, to suggest to me links and connections I might not have made or noticed myself.
  • allow me to export the data easily, in different formats — to a blog, say, or a newsletter — or to another application should I choose to
  • support existing standards such as Markdown, so I don’t have to learn new formatting techniques and the data can easily move around and be read by other apps (Spotlight, say)
  • work on all platforms. I would like to be able to access the data via app, web, desktop and mobile.
  • charge a fee that is reasonable — to both sides. I want to pay because I want the app to thrive, but I don’t want to be charged an arm and a leg unless it changes my life. I for one use lots of different apps, some for only a few minutes per day. and don’t want to pay the same as someone who uses only one app for 99% of their work.

Roam and its competitors

(I use the term loosely; Roam has definitely shaken up the market, pushing others to build alternatives and incumbents to up their game)

Roam Research

dendron | The personal knowledge management (PKM) tool that grows as you do! (thanks, Karthik)

Amplenote

Bear

TiddlyWiki

WorkFlowy

Dynalist

Obsidian

Ulysses (I use this a lot; they say they’re not a markdown editor, but it’s a technicality.)

Others

Neuron Zettelkasten

Module – More than a note

amna

Forward

Bublup | The Cloud Reimagined

Nimbus Note – One place to manage all your information | knowledge base | tasks | projects | etc

Sound

Web annotation

Who thought this would make a comeback?

Kontxt

TrailMarks

Annotation for Developers : Hypothesis

Long-time players that are still around

Tinderbox — a personal favourite that I use quite extensively.

TheBrain: The Ultimate Digital Memory (another favourite of mine, still in use more than 20 years on)

OmniOutliner

MyInfo This was my outliner of choice when I was a Windows guy. Still going strong.

Evernote

DEVONthink, professional document and information management for the Mac and iOS I also use this a lot, but not as a note taker or information organiser. More a library, storing anything I might need later.

Other lists

Artificial Brain Networked notebook app (much more detailed than this list, but a slightly narrower definition of what I think is a somewhat broader church.

Google, browsers and the illusion of choice

By | July 9, 2020
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UntitledImage

It’s Google’s world, which means we’re always leaking data to them.

Some of us assiduously search for other options. But it’s not easy.

Two reasons: We don’t have a firm grasp of the size of the elephant we’re confronting, and secondly, we don’t really understand what we’re doing when we’re online. What data are we leaking, and how, and what does that mean? Is it something we should be worried about? If we wanted to limit our exposure to any one conglomerate, how would we go about it?

Inspired by the recent publication (PDF, as are many of the links in this piece) of the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority on ‘Online platforms and digital advertising’ , I thought I’d take a stab at prodding at least part of this animal.

Let’s take a look at browsers.

At least on the desktop (meaning laptops, PCs, anything that’s not a small-screen device) we spend a lot of time in the browser. (The opposite is true on mobile: eMarketer found in 2019 that 90% of time on mobile is spent in apps, rather than the browser. But as you’ll see, that doesn’t really help.)

So where does Google sit in all this?

You can have any colour you like, so long as it’s chrome

Google launched its Chrome browser in September 2008. At that point it seemed a somewhat silly thing to do — as the chart below shows, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer dominated the browser world (by virtue of Windows, which was on 90% or more of computers) and to a lesser extent Mozilla Firefox (the data below probably exaggerates its market share around that time).

Google made a splash when they launched the browser (Sundar Pichai headed the team) but played it carefully, saying that they would work with the Open Source community, were just continuing on their path, and promised the browser would just get out of people’s way: “The web gets better with more options and innovation,” Sundar was quoted as saying. “Google Chrome is another option, and we hope it contributes to making the web even better.”

Sure. I was excited too, and like everyone else went ahead and installed it, feeling that I was contributing to an exciting, and exclusive, new way of browsing.

So how do things look, 12 years on? It’s no longer exactly ‘another option’. It’s the option:

You can see how Microsoft (orange), asleep at the controls, allows Google (blue) to come from nothing and within a few years completely destroy it — and Firefox (green) for that matter. Where Microsoft had destroyed Netscape, so Google destroyed it. 

So Google has what it wants. But what does it get with this browser dominance?

Data. Lots of it. Google has an insatiable appetite for your data, and has tweaked its privacy policy to ensure that it’s collecting as much of your data as it can across everything you do.

In 2012 Google introduced a policy that deliberately and explicitly connected all an individual’s data across all its platforms and services. Here’s how the Competition Law Forum (CLF) at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law put it in a submission to the CMA: “In 2012 Google announced the introduction of a new privacy policy that would encompass all the services Google offers, including popular services such as YouTube, Chrome, Google Play and Google Maps, replacing the previous individual’s policies that governed each service. Said privacy policy authorises Google to gather detailed personal data from any of those services and combine it for the purposes listed therein, including to create consumer profiles that are valuable for advertising purposes.”

Combining all this data is exactly what advertisers want, and the way that Google maximises the value it extracts from you. That’s why it has so many services — they are touchpoints, places where Google can, effectively, spy on you and know where you are, what you’re doing, and crucially what you want or intend to do. If you don’t think you use much of Google’s services, check out this site which lists all their products and services. You might be surprised.

Whatever browser you use, we got you covered

Here are some things that happen irrespective of what browser you’re using (if you’re on Android see below):

  • If you use any Google tool that requires your signing in, then it will be able to track your activities, and match it to your profile.
  • Even if you’re not signed in, Google will still collect information via the browser (or application, or device) you’re using.
  • If you sign in to any Google service, then you will be automatically signed in to all other Google services — or services you’re using via Google’s single-sign on, whether or not you have them open on your device.

Chrome is where the heart is

And if you’re specifically using Chrome:

Signing in to any Google service

If you sign on to any Google service in Chrome, Google will automatically sign you in to the browser, thus linking, or at least potentially linking, everything you do in that browser to your profile. 1

Clearing your cache and going Incognito

Even if you clear your browser cache, Google can still track you via a persistent identifier (called an X-client-Data header) in Chrome. According to a lawsuit this identifier is within the browser Google can track you even in Incognito (private) mode. “In short, if you are using Google’s Chrome browser, Google’s code in that browser sends information back to Google’s servers identifying the specific, individual browser (associated with you) that is viewing any Webpage that has implemented Ad Manager, Google Analytics, the Google Button, Google Approved Pixels, etc,” the lawsuit claims.

A report on the lawsuit is here. 2

Passive data

While this piece (and the data) is mainly about Chrome on the desktop, it appears that Chrome on the mobile phone (in Android) is sending “data to Google even in the absence of any user interaction,” according to Douglas Schmidt of Vanderbilt University, quoted in the above lawsuit. “Our experiments show that a dormant, stationary Android phone (with Chrome active in the background) communicated location information to Google 340 times during a 24-hour period, or at an average of 14 data communications per hour.”

A separate report by Digital Content Next in 2018 found that two thirds of information “collected or inferred by Google through an Android phone and the Chrome browser was done through ‘passive’ methods, that is where an application is set up to gather information while it is running, possibly without the user’s knowledge.” 3

Sludge techniques

In the past — I couldn’t replicate this, so I’m not sure it still happens — Google would try to deter users from changing their default search engine in Chrome. This according to a submission by ‘privacy-priority’ search engine DuckDuckGo to the CMA. (DuckDuckGo uses Microsoft’s search engine Bing.)

Don’t take my word for it

The report just issued by the CMA concludes: “Google has developed unrivalled access to data through its operation of the largest browser (Chrome) and the Android mobile operating system. “4

The report goes further. While it acknowledges that Google has said it is considering phasing out third-party cookies, which have become a target for those seeking to increase browsing privacy, this may end up making Google’s position even stronger. “(T)hrough its control over the leading web browser (Chrome) and mobile OS (Android), Google can also influence standards (such as support for third- party cookies) that affect rivals’ ability to collect and use targeting data (eg users’ browsing behaviour).” 5

Google hasn’t been great about explaining itself

Google has had a chance to say its piece to the group putting together the report. But you can’t help feeling they still don’t quite get it. Here’s a screenshot from a ‘non-confidential’ version of their submitted reply. If you have to black out a portion of a reply about the mode that in theory protects your users from snooping the most, you can’t blame them for still feeling a bit icky:

Successful in doing what? Persuading users they’re safe when they’re not? In collecting data when they think they’re not? Why would this bit be blacked out? It doesn’t seem like it’s hiding a commercial secret. Weird.

The Chromium wedge

It should be pointed out, as the CMA has, that Google has an extra lever: its control of Chromium, the engine on which Chrome is built. Microsoft, Opera and Vivaldi are all built on Chromium, open source software that Google controls, and which also powers the Chromium OS, the operating system which runs a dozen or more low-power laptops called Chromebooks made by Samsung, Asus, Acer, HP, Toshiba, Lenovo and Google itself.

You’ll see a list of them if you visit that link. But tf you visit the Chromium home page itself, you won’t see links to other browsers running Chromium. Other than Google’s own:

You can’t help wondering, given Google’s past in slowly building up dominant positions, firstly in search, and then in the browser, that they’re trying to do something similar with the computer operating system. Yes, Chromium is pretty piddling when it compares to Windows of MacOS, but that’s not the point. With Chromium the browser they now have leverage over Microsoft — who would have thought that? — the minor players like Vivaldi and Opera. As I will explain elsewhere they have control over other players in different ways. Just because they haven’t used that leverage doesn’t mean they can’t. Remember how they eviscerated RSS by controlling the RSS Reader market? I do.

(I will be exploring Chromium in a future post but it’s worth pointing out that Chromium underpins many apps and ads beyond the browser. According to 51Degrees.mobi Ltd, a mobile and data consultancy which submitted its own findings to the CMA: “Chromium is everywhere. Beyond classic web browsers including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, or Samsung Browser, Chromium underpins many applications and advertising. For example, a web page or advert displayed withing the Facebook application is displayed using Chromium. An advert tapped within an Android application appears within a Chromium controlled experience.”

Bottom line

I’ve loved Google products for a long time, and I still use a lot of them. And as a journalist I found Google a much easier company to deal with than the other US tech giants. But I never got useful answers out of them when things got tricky, and as this topic highlights, they’ve never been properly candid about what data is being collected and how it’s being used. I don’t pretend this little stick-prod is going to pry anything useful out of them, or really help you make a decision about whether to change your online behaviour. Neither do I pretend their rivals are any better.

But I want to give a clap or two the CMA for at least trying to figure some of this stuff out and to map some of the ecosystem that generates all this money (including Facebook, which I’ll take a look at in future columns.) It’s a shame the UK is not part of the European Union anymore. A report like that with the EU behind it could have started some waves.

Transparency: In my role at Cleft Stick, I have done consulting work for Microsoft, a competitor to Google on some of these issues, on unrelated issues. I have no NDAs that I believe would affect my point of view.

  1. GOOGLE ADVERTISING TOOLS (FORMERLY DOUBLECLICK) OVERVIEW Last Updated October 1, 2019, paper prepared by Oracle
    (“Oracle–ResponsetoSoS–Appendix1–DoubleclickOverview.pdf”) ↩
  2. Google Sundar Pichai has explained it in a letter to the United States House of Representatives Judiciary Committee: “When a user conducts a search on Google in Chrome Incognito and signed-out modes, we set a cookie to correlate searches conducted in the same Incognito window during the same browsing session… We will, however, use certain factors … such as the browser type, language, time of search, location (or an estimation of location), and prior browser session searches, to improve Search ranking relevance for the user’s query.” ↩
  3. From the DuckDuckGo submission, see above ↩
  4. Paragraph 7:61 ↩
  5. Appendix 7, Paragraph 114. Others have pointed out that in fact phasing out third party cookies would strengthen Google (and Facebook). ↩

Workplace surveillance, from Russia with love

By | July 2, 2020
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(Part 3 of a series on post-covid remote working. Part 2 here)

Ok, so you’ve decided to install some workplace surveillance software, despite all the good reasons why you shouldn’t. Do you know exactly what you’re letting yourself in for?

Staffcop logo 3

A basic question: Who, exactly, are these companies?

Let’s take a look at one: StaffCop — the dude with the shades. It’s owned by Atom (sometimes Atomic) Security Inc (sometimes LLC), which despite its name is actually based in the Russian city of Novosibirsk, in southwest Siberia. (Here’s StaffCop’s Russian website.)

And what do they do?

A datasheet for its enterprise product promises “employee monitoring the way you couldn’t imagine!” which probably sounds better in Russian. Staffcop is refreshingly candid about what it offers — all the usual stuff, as well as a ‘wayback machine’ to rewind and see what an employee was doing at any specified period in the past.

It can even activate computer microphones to “actually hear what’s going on around specific workstations and specific times.” (It’s not clear to me whether this is part of the ‘wayback machine’s’ capabilities. The datasheet also mentions being able to activate the computer’s webcam. The latest version of its software, released on June 22, includes the following:

  • can record any audio in any application
  • can recognise faces on web-cam snapshots (presumably those photos discreetly taken by the employees’ webcam)

In short, StaffCop is basically a way to hack into your employees’ computers. And that, of course, raises not only ethical questions, but also practical ones. If a company is using StaffCop, say, what vulnerabilities might they have opened up? There are two possibilities — does the hacking software itself incorporate inadvertent vulnerabilities, or render existing software vulnerable? And secondly, where is all this data the company is collecting on its employees going, besides the boss’ console?

Well, to answer the first question, StaffCop has previous. In 2015, it was found to be using a piece of software called Redirector, which was developed by a now defunct company called Komodia, which intercepts traffic on a target computer. The software was built with the goal of snooping in mind, along with manipulating data (including decrypting it), injecting ads etc. Vulnerabilities with the software were discovered in 2015, which would have allowed third parties to conduct man-in-the-middle attacks, which are exactly what they sound like — someone grabbing data on its journey between two computers.

So what about the company name? Any time I see a company having slightly different versions of its name, I get nosy. StaffCop, it transpires, has its roots deep in the world of spam.

Atom Security Inc. was set up in 2001 and says that it is (was) a Microsoft Certified Partner. The CEO of the company is cited as one Dmitry Kandybovich, who appears to have 61% of the Russian entity LLC Atom Bezopasnost, who on his rather threadbare LinkedIn profile is also listed as chief of sales for one AtomPark Software.

AtomPark Software has a somewhat different pedigree, focused mainly on mass mail software. Indeed that’s its domain name. AtomPark has long been in the cross hairs of the anti-spam brigade: The SpamHaus Project has a whole page dedicated to them, and in particular one Evgeny Medvednikov, who it says is (or was) owner of the domains staffcop.com, among others. 4

Medvednikov seems to have moved on, and is now based in New York, according to his LinkedIn profile where he lists his achievements simply: “Run and scale Internet projects. Again and again. Can not disclose them all.” (AtomPark is mentioned in a recommendation he gives one of his former employees.) He has invested in several U.S. companies, mostly email marketing companies. He founded SendPulse, a company which combines multi-channel marketing with chatbots, automating much of the process. It claims amongst its clients PwC, Radisson and Swatch.

And that pretty much squares the circle. I’m definitely not saying that just because StaffCop is based in Russia that it’s not qualified or trustworthy. I’m not saying that its roots in spam and use of dubious third-party software disqualifies it. Nor am I saying that all other companies doing this kind of thing have similar backgrounds.

But it should be obvious by now, after reading these three posts, that the nature of these tools — the intent, and the technical knowhow to implement that intent — inevitably leads them into an ethically compromised world, which is where spam and hacking have long made their home. By definition and design they are snooping on a user, using subterfuge and overriding, or bypassing, existing security features of the computer system. That compromises the work computer, and it also compromises the individual.

It also, inevitably, compromises the user’s trust — in this case, in their own boss.

If as a boss you can’t trust your employee, and you go down this road, then don’t expect your employee to trust you.

Employee snooping is big business. Expect it to get bigger

By | July 2, 2020
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I wrote previously about how snooping on employees is going to become the norm as managers scramble to deal with a workforce that is reluctant — or unable — to return to the workplace. Enabling this will be a host of tools available for companies to do this. It’ll be impossible for a lot of bosses to resist.

There’s already a whole market — worth $4 billion by 2023 according to this report — of employee surveillance tools. Some of them sound cute (Hubstaff, Time Doctor), some less so (VeriClock, ActivTrak, StaffCop and Work Examiner).

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The second question asked of you before you can access Time Doctor’s home page. 

They all feed off the fear of the Manager By-Line-of-Sight, like Workpuls:

Remote work has certainly made employees more independent from their superiors, if nothing else, then because they simply aren’t in the same physical location. That means you are never quite sure if the staff is watching funny videos or actually working.

While no one expects people to work for eight hours straight, it’s important to ensure that they are working on tasks that actually have high priority, and not just answer a few emails and go out for ice-cream and rollerblading for the rest of the day.

This perception is fed by a longstanding piece of ‘data’ which claims that workers actually only work 2 hours and 53 minutes in any work day. This study is regularly cited, though its source rarely, as proof positive we’re all lazy gits when it comes to home working. I’ve written a separate piece debunking this little gem.

So what do these tools do? Well, most monitor what software you’re using and what websites you’re logged into, for a start. The idea is to virtually handcuff you to work. For example, Time Doctor will

  • ask the user if they’re still working when they visit a social media site. “Whenever an employee accesses unproductive sites like these, the app automatically sends them a pop-up asking them if they’re still working. This little nudge is usually enough to get them off the social media site and back to work.”
  • Managers will have access to a ‘Poor Time Use’ report that details what sites an employee accessed and how long they spent there. Time Doctor can also take screenshots of employees’ screens at random intervals to ensure that they’re on productive sites.
  • Some, like Keeper, will monitor employees’ browsing history, ostensibly to check they’re not venturing onto the dark web.

Workpuls, meanwhile, boasts

Our all-seeing agent captures all employee actions. From app and website usage, to words typed in a program, right down to detecting which tasks are being worked on based on mouse clicks.

The more sinister aspect to this is that managers not only don’t trust their employees to work remotely, but they don’t trust them not to steal stuff. And we’re not talking paperclips. This is called Data Loss Prevention, or DLP, and is itself big business. One estimate has the market worth $1.21 billion in 2019, rising to $3.75 billion by 2025.

These tools include (this according to a deck from Teramind)

  • machine learning which scans an employee’s workflow, ‘fingerprinting’ documents and then tracking any changes and movement
  • ‘on the fly’ content discovery
  • clipboard monitoring — everything you copy and paste will be collected
  • advanced optical character recognition: think studying images and videos watched and uploaded by employees to check for steganographic data exfiltration (steganography is when data is hidden in a supposedly harmless message, often a picture.)

It’s not so much the eye-popping technology involved, as the realisation that everything that an employee does on a work computer (or a work-related computer) can be, and probably is, being monitored.

To be fair, companies like Teramind are focusing less on employee productivity and more on catching the bad apples. But these tools still sound to me overly intrusive. And in my next post I’ll show why.