About

Fifty notes on monitoring at work, argued above the legal floor.

Who it is for

Whoever has to decide — a manager, a general counsel, a board member — and has found that the legal question answers less than expected.

The position

Compliance is a floor and it is routinely treated as a ceiling. Lawful answers whether you will be penalised; it does not answer whether the measure should exist.

The imbalance in employment means consent cannot carry the weight placed on it, which puts the burden of justification on the party imposing. In most organisations it sits the other way round.

The costs that matter are on no account: behaviour that stops, candour that disappears, facilities that go unused.

And the arguments for monitoring are stated fully, because a collection that only objects is not worth reading.

What is deliberately absent

How the technology works. Detection, modelling and device management are separate subjects and this one begins where they end.

Product and vendor names.

Figures for the prevalence of monitoring, because those come from people selling the tooling.

Nothing here is legal advice

Obligations recur in shape and differ substantially in content. Everything here is orientation and the local answer requires local advice.

About this domain

This address previously belonged to a Chicago event venue, which is still operating at its main site. There is a page about that.