When you make personal calls at work, employers can figure who you are talking to, how often you call and how long you stay on the line. Is such ability simply good management oversight, or creepy extension of NSA-style snooping into the workplace?
I began to wonder after receiving an email from Data Horizon Technology. It advertises telephone monitoring software with unusually blunt (and somewhat grammatically challenged) language about snooping on workers. “Find Out WHO Is…Making Up Normal Personal Calls…Most Expensive Calls…Longest Duration Calls,” it advertises.
The company said its software could “automatically generate email alerts for almost any activity on your PBX, especially those suspicious ones.” It cited examples of after-hours calls, calls with competitors or ex-employees and repeatedly dialed numbers. Data Horizon Technology, which is based in the United Arab Emirates, listed some of its clients as a cement company, the
One of the firms that tried the software was Crowe Horwath, a Dubai-based tax and risk consultancy. James Mathew, a managing director there, said only two or three people in the top management knew about it and that employees were not told. But he decided to discontinue its use. “I didn't want to police my staff too much,” he said.
Data Horizon Technology did not respond to emails or a phone call for comment.
Andrei Shimanovich, 27, a founder of another company offering phone tracking software called mSpy, did agree to discuss his business. The company advertises: “mSpy tablet and cell phone spyware is 100% invisible and undetectable. Its outstanding functionality allows you to read, track, and monitor any activity on a target device.”
Originally from Minsk in Belarus, Shimanovich moved nine years ago to London, where his company is now based. “Business owners would like to monitor their employees, what they do,” he said. “To build a transparent business and to understand what is going on, it is their responsibility to control their business. If they control their business, their business will be profitable.”
“Monitoring software it is not spying, it is just monitoring. You just look what is going right and what is going wrong.”
He said his firm does most of its sales in the United States and recently added its one millionth subscriber. Of those, 90 percent buy the home edition, mostly aimed at parents monitoring their children’s safety. Ten percent are small businesses.
“If the company provides a corporate phone, the cell phone is provided to you so you can work on it, and if in the employer’s contract they put that they can monitor you and listen to your calls, so it is legal,” Shimanovich said.
Indeed, in the United States, monitoring is allowed if business content is the focus of the effort.
“Generally, if an employee is using a company-owned computer or phone system, and an employer can show a valid business reason for monitoring that employee’s email or phone conversations, then the employer is well within his or her rights to do so,” the U.S. Small Business Administration writes in a blog on its website.
Yet even some within the industry advise a cautious and more nuanced approach. Dinesh Ravishanker is the CEO and co-founder of Santa Monica, California-based Callfire, which provides firms with the ability to broadcast phone messages to thousands, implement a phone tree to incoming calls and track incoming and outgoing calls.
“The trend that is most significant currently is the ubiquity and the ease of use of such tools,” he said. “If it is during the work day and it is using company equipment and there is a desire to understand how that company equipment is being used and how the time is being spent when the worker is on the clock, my personal belief that there may be some significance and there may be some right of the employer to do so.”
“Ethically speaking it is also a tough line -- you want to be careful that you are not destroying the trust of your employees and your partners when you are doing that kind of thing. It is really going to erode whatever kind of trust you had before or after, especially if they are made aware of such monitoring occurring.”
He also noted that U.S.-based companies offering software to monitor calls would likely take a gentler approach in advertising their services than Data Horizon Technology, even if their product had similar capabilities. “U.S. firms are a lot smarter than that to advertise their services that way,” he said. “I don't think companies in the U.S., generally speaking, would kind of list it out so blatantly.”
By the way. if you are reading this article on the job, it may be time to get back to work, lest anyone notice you slacking off.
