September 10, 2026 — 10:37am
Do you ever feel as if you’re being watched? As though someone is keeping an eye on what you get up to throughout the day while you work? Unfortunately, you’re probably right.
There’s an emerging trend of software being used by employers to monitor exactly what their staff are doing at all times. It’s called “bossware”, and there’s been a sharp rise in usage across almost every industry in recent years.
A report released in March by the Human Technology Institute at the University of Technology Sydney found that “surveillance creep” was increasing at the same time as our legal understanding and awareness of it was not.
It showed that 91 per cent of surveyed employers used some form of monitoring of their employees’ performance, yet fewer than 10 per cent of people thought that it was happening in their own workplaces. That’s a large disconnect between perception and reality.
