Ever get the feeling you’re being watched while working at home? It’s entirely possible your activities are actually being tracked – from your web searches and social activity to what you type on the keyboard. How much protection does the law offer?
The emergency phase of the COVID-19 pandemic may be over, but it has certainly left its legacy on the workplace. No longer do black-suited employees trudge to the CBD every morning; now many employees work flexibly, spending half the week working from their home study (or the couch, or the dining table), heading into the office only a couple of times a week. It’s known as hybrid working, and it would seem it’s here to stay.
But hybrid working brings challenges of its own for employees as managers navigate how best to monitor their staff members’ output. The result is a proliferation of technologies aimed at determining whether an employee is working and how productive and efficient they really are. This includes things like email monitoring, which many workers would be familiar with, as well as technologies that sound a little more sinister: keyboard activity trackers, cameras and videos that monitor attentiveness, and software that tracks what apps and websites an employee visits.
And this isn’t just limited to office-based work. We’ve all heard of the sort of workplace monitoring that Amazon employees are subjected to. Drivers in truck driving fleets are also often monitored closely for their attention and movements.
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The Department of Justice (DOJ) recently provided important information about how it plans to handle the surge in data-driven False Claims Act (FCA) qui tam lawsuits. On April 30, 2026, DOJ announc...