AI surveillance raises risks for employers, attorney says
Companies using employee monitoring technology should keep their surveillance in check to avoid employee discontent and potential legal troubles, a local labor attorney told human resources professionals during the Society for Human Resource Management’s Southern Labor Symposium held recently in Ponce.
“Employees do not like Big Brother,” attorney Sylmarie Arizmendi, who spoke at the conference on the use of artificial intelligence in HR at the conference, told News is my Business.
“They don’t want someone watching every sound and move they make,” she said, citing a 2024 Cornell University study that extreme monitoring reduces employees’ productivity.
Surveillance tools used to track and analyze physical activity, facial expressions, vocal tone and verbal and written communication are seen by employees as a loss of autonomy, leading to discontent and poor performance, Cornell reported.
Organizations using AI to monitor employees’ behavior and productivity can expect them to complain more, be less productive and want to quit more often, unless the technology can be framed as assisting rather than judging their performance, according to the study.
Extreme employee monitoring can lead to serious legal problems for employers, Arizmendi said, using the Barclays case as an example.
In 2020, London-based bank Barclays started using a Sapience Analytics software to monitor employees by detecting keystrokes, mouse movements and inactivity times at employees’ workstations. Employees complained that they were being subjected to excessive surveillance, micromanagement and invasion of privacy, describing themselves as enslaved to their desks.
Their objections prompted an investigation by the Information Commissioner’s Office for potential violations of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, and Barclays now faces up to $1.1 billion in fines.
“These programs sound an alarm when an employee’s workstation is idle for a certain number of minutes,” Arizmendi explained. “If an employee goes to the bathroom or to get a cup of coffee and takes longer than three minutes, or whatever time period the system is set up for, an alarm sounds in HR to let them know that the employee has been inactive.”
That kind of surveillance tool already cost Amazon $35 million in fines, she said. In January 2024, the French Data Protection Authority (CNIL) fined Amazon’s warehouses in France 32 million euros (about $34.7 million at the time) for what it called “excessively intrusive” employee surveillance.
CNIL said the system used by Amazon France Logistique potentially required employees to “justify every break or interruption” and that it was “illegal to set up a system measuring work interruptions with such accuracy, potentially requiring employees to justify every break or interruption.”
“Sometimes companies don’t understand the program’s capabilities,” Arizmendi said, citing lawsuits brought against companies such as McDonald’s and Apple over privacy issues in the workplace.
Most companies monitor employees
Despite employees’ objections, research shows that more employers are turning to monitoring to keep workers from slacking off.
A 2025 ExpressVPN survey found that 74% of U.S. employers use online tracking tools to monitor work activities, including real-time screen tracking (59%) and web browsing logs (62%), Express VPN reported.
More than six in 10 companies (61%) use AI-powered analytics to measure productivity, and 67% collect biometric data to monitor employee behavior and attendance. Inside physical offices, 75% of employers use monitoring methods like video surveillance (69%) and biometric access controls (58.3%). Yet only 22% of employees report knowing they are being monitored online.
The survey also found that employees who face both online and physical monitoring report 45% higher stress levels than those in less-surveilled environments (28%), and one in six would quit over excessive workplace surveillance.
“This type of surveillance is not well received. There are other ways to monitor employees,” Arizmendi said.
The bottom line should be outcomes, she added. “Do you really care how often an employee is going to the bathroom? Or do you care if the employee is getting the job done in the time allotted. At the end of the day, are they doing their jobs or not?”
