Employee Surveillance Software Demand Increase By 108%: Webcam Access, Click Tracking For WFH Staff

As per a new study, employers have started using employee surveillance software to keep a track of their employees’ activities while they work from their homes.

The use of such surveillance software has gone up by 55% in June 2020 as compared to the time before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Read on to find out what the report says right here!

Demand For Surveillance Software Increases By 55%

When the COVID-19 pandemic started showing its ugly head here in India, a nationwide lockdown was imposed. This forced a lot of employees to start working from home, so as to avoid being infected by the dangerous disease.

A new study has shown that the demand for employee surveillance software has increased by 55%, and this includes softwares that can record anything on the employee’s software through multiple methods, such as webcam access to random screenshot monitoring.

VPN review website Top10VPN has used its global monitoring data to analyze more than 200 terms that are related to employee surveillance software. Both generic and brand specific queries have been taken into consideration for this study. The searches done during March-May 2020 have been compared to those done during the preceding year.

As per the study, the search for “How to monitor employees working from home” has increased by 1,705% in April and 652% in May 2020 as compared to the previous year’s searches.

Which Are The Most Popular Surveillance Tools?

The most popular surveillance tools are Time Doctor, Hubstaff, and FlexiSPY. The tools with the highest increase in demand are Teramind, DeskTime, Kickidler, and Time Doctor. In fact, the interest in Time Doctor has increased by three times than what it was before the onset of the pandemic.

As per reports, the top three tools make up for almost 60% of global demand in surveillance software due to the multiple features that they offer. 81% of the most popular employee surveillance tools have a feature of keystroke logging wherein the employers will be able to see every click of the keyboard.

61% of software tools offer Instant Messaging monitoring so that private instant messages can be viewed. Employers have also been able to monitor employees’ conversations at any point of time.

65% of these tools also send User Action Alerts wherein they notify when the keyboard has been idle for a specified period of time. 38% software are also capable of remote control takeovers such as blocking access to websites, or remote installation of software.

How does this affect employees? There is a possibility that the constant feeling of being watched all the time might hamper the employee’s productivity