If you work remotely, your bosses are probably using software to track you. Here's how they'll catch you slacking off.

What dystopia do you guys live in? I've worked for some small companies and some corporates and neither did this shit, that really wouldn't fly here.

It's illegal in the EU, so probably not there.
- That might be it. The more I learn the happier I am I live in EU.
- It's legal to spy on your employees in USA?
  I'm beginning to think all their tinfoil conspiracy theories aren't completely baseless..

If I’m getting my work done, they have no reason to complain.

You would think so, but companies generally believe that they own the right to your full potential output - not just the tasks that they set you.
- Which is bullshit because input is not a linear or exponential function of just time.

This is why we need unions. Shit like this should be a non-starter.

I work in a highly unionised sector, they still monitor our workload when we WFH and personally I welcome it. I know some people on my team took the piss at home and of it's a choice between them getting caught out or us all having to go back to the office full time, I choose the former.
- What kind of work do you do that you can't measure work done by the actual amount of work done?

If you care about privacy; you tell your employer clearly that you do not tolerate "Boss-ware" or other spyware on your personal devices.

If they give a shit; they will then be forced to issue one that the company owns and manages. If they don't give a shit; you walk away. Lots of companies will hire you without that crap. Don't believe people who gaslight you by saying "But every company uses it!" or anything sounding remotely like it.

On a company-issued machine; you tell your employer clearly that you do not tolerate "Boss-ware" that will be used to track or manage your time. Walk away; if they refuse to keep your machine clean of it or attempt to raise any concern that you're not at your PC every damned moment of your core hours. You have a right to live your life. As long as your immediate bosses and supervisors are happy with the quality and quantity of the work you submit, you've done your job. If they are unhappy with the quality or quantity of your work then, they can respectfully schedule a meeting with you to discuss it. The way an actual adult should be treated, and, would be treated in an actual office that observes all standard rules of professionalism. With respect.

TL;DR: Do not accept the implementation of Boss-ware as if the decision was made with any professionalism or respect for you. If they implement it; you leave as fast as possible. Take any friends that you can with you too, if you can.

My employer bought my laptop and had it shipped directly from Apple to my doorstep. No nefarious software installed. I must be missing out on some good old fashioned fun.
As an aside; there are USB devices which can act like keyboards and mice; some of which are very clever and intricate. You can use them to your advantage while using work-issued equipment; but keep in mind you'll need to program it on your personal PC.
You can definitely get creative with some of them and have them simulate the typing and clicking of a lot of different things at random intervals.
- Also worth noting: if at all possible you'll want to program a different USB ID onto the device.
- They typically suck. A lot of them just click 5 times a second, constantly. Often they are recognized as odd hardware.

I'm probably about to get down voted. But as an IT guy, I install tracking software on a very small subset of systems of employees that are pretty much about to be fired for being useless. The reason we do that is basically to catch employees being dishonest. It's quite possible that the nature of the work makes their productivity hard to gauge. Once we install the software we have some data we can use to push back against outright lies. If we see them spending 75% of their day planning their next vacation instead of getting their work done, they are gone. We don't install the software unless you are already failing to do your job.

Objection! There is some contradiction in your statement. How do you tell they are already failing to do their job, if you say that their productivity is hard to gauge? If they deliver the expected results, why does it matter that they spend time planning their vacation?
If the employee is already found to be useless, the company can fire them without data from the tracking.
- We don't know they are useless, that is just the suspicion. The nature of the work is that sometimes output can be impacted by forces outside of their control. If we wait long enough, the pattern will be obvious, but why pay someone to not do work when we can just install software on their computer that will almost immediately let us know that they aren't even putting in full days?
  I honestly don't get the opposition to this kind of thing. You're on your work computer, not your own device. Use the work computer for work and use your personal devices for personal stuff. If your contract says you work 40 hours per week, work 40 hours per week.
Can you name those "softwares" ?
- Sapience
I've done this too. Someone who was not outputting the same amount of work as their colleagues, or when they did it was simple stuff with no real innovative features. The bare minimum.
Pulled logs off their machine, and they spent 4 hours on Google maps (they're also a taxi driver after hours) and messing about on PayPal for another few hours (they also did some consultancy).
There was around 37 minutes of work done that day.
They were no longer burdened with this job which seemed to interfere with their other evening/weekend jobs.

What kind of ghoulish engineer works on Time Doctor's software and is able to sleep at night?

I mean... you should be working right? That is what you are getting paid by the company to do. If you are able to get your job done in less than the time/activity needed by the software that's another issue.
If you are working from home you are still supposed to be working that is your agreement with your employer. Sure do the bare minimum if you want, but you still need to get your job done.
It's the people that are taking advantage of the work from home that risk it for the rest of us actually working from home.
- The company should be able to determine that your productivity isn't good enough by the work you produce. Not micromanaging the keystrokes per minute.
  If your work is really so unimportant that slacking off for 4+ hours a day isn't noticed, they should be making you redundant. Not forcing spyware on every innocent employee
- If my employer is happy with my work output then who cares? This should be a last resort for folks underperforming.

Can someone with knowledge please provide links, lists, specifics, because all the articles I find list like, 3 names: "Teramind, Time Doctor, StaffCop, and others." I want to know what "others" are, how many there are, etc etc. I am actually getting quite frustrated with these articles because they talk very generally about some nebulous hypothetical dystopian employee monitoring software, without actually just fucking telling me what the fuck to look for.

that's both unreasonable and not the right way to approach this. Your assumption is that if you knew the names of all possible processes that you could then be in a position to make better decisions. the problem is names are useless - it's trivial for software to run under different names, so believing names can help you somehow is a waste of time.
- This is blatantly false. Name and fucking shame each variety of software. These cockroaches can't stand the light of public attention. The more people who know how to spot and identify malicious and suspicious boss-ware behavior, the better. It protects the user to know that the software exists; as they can better be prepared to combat and deter abuses of this software by unprofessional and shitty bosses.
  No; it isn't going to be foolproof. That's not the intent here. The intent is for everyone to be able to name, shame, and identify when software that their employer is deploying is going to be behaving in a manner that blatantly violates their rights to privacy in a non-constructive way that threatens them.
- Hmm OK so I'm going to have to be a bit sneakier than that then.
Add Veriato to the list. A lot of this type of Spyware is sold as "insider risk" or "behavior analytics" software.
I, unfortunately, was forced at my last job to implement and maintain this program.
- Any company that does this to it's employees is dooming itself to failure anyways. A complete lack of trust makes for a very hostile working environment; and it will generally drive employees away anyways.
I mean the article is on "Business Insider"...

This is the best summary I could come up with:

In Australia, a woman said she was fired from her consultant role after her employer's monitoring software found "very low keystroke activity" on her laptop between October and December.

Time Doctor has seen business pick up over the past few years as remote work has taken off, Borja said, and the return-to-office movement hasn't eliminated the demand for employee-tracking software.

A March Resume Builder survey of 1,000 US business leaders with a primarily remote or hybrid workforce found that 96% of them use some form of employee-monitoring software, sometimes called bossware, to monitor worker productivity.

At Tesla's New York plant, workers told Bloomberg that the company tracks how active they are on their computers — and that they've avoided taking bathroom breaks as a result.

Refusing to turn on your webcam during a meeting, for instance, could give your employer the right to fire you if you live in the US, legal experts previously told Insider.

"Everybody in the industry talks about it — you've got the all-seeing eye of Big Brother watching everything the employees are doing, and it's a little creepy," a Time Doctor staffer told Insider in 2021.

The original article contains 678 words, the summary contains 191 words. Saved 72%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Good bot

If you're on their device, assume it's a giant surveillance device. If you're forced to do company work on your device, stick it in a VM.

Say no to installing closed source software and say no to installing spyware. Simple as that.

If it's a company laptop with a company policy chances are saying no to policy is saying no to that job. While seasoned employees can do that, new employees are SOL
- This is blatantly false. There are plenty of jobs out there who will hire you and not do something shitty like installing boss-ware on a computer.
  If you allow or enable these employers to get away with it; you're part of the problem. 99.5% of jobs do not require boss-ware to get done properly; and if your immediate bosses or supervisors had no problems with you before...consider it a large red flag. If you're joining a company and they mention this; consider it a large red flag.
How does this have any effect on work provided laptops? No job I've ever had gave me full control of the software installed in my laptop.
- I was coming from a mindset you were using your own laptop or buying your own laptop.

Pretty sure if my work place tries to do this people will just quit... Employers are already facing retention issue.

I quit a job after three days because they wanted me to install that shit on my machine. It was not mentioned in the interview and I specifically asked how they measured hours worked. They just said "we have a timesheet software where you input your times". It was also an emergency hire for a job someone quit two weeks before deadline. /s Great place to work!! /s
- Thats why so many employers say they can't hire the right person. You did the right thing. I will also quit in that situation. If an employer don't trust me, what is the point working there?

I never turn my work laptop on at home. I don't even have any bookmarks saved in the browser. I have a .txt file synced using Syncthing that I treat as a perpetual notepad where I keep my links. I don't think I've even turned my work laptop on at home or charged it at home this year.

Of course, these are things I can get away with since I'm a professor. But still, I have received emails asking if I need training on how to use my computer because I have barely used it. They really, really wanted me to use Outlook instead of the webapp for some reason. I never did. But, they were so insistent. Recently we lost the ability to change wallpaper, default browsers and quick launch icons.

Work computers: almost a neat perk.

Maybe dual boot into Linux
- I already got in big trouble for that about 6 or 7 years ago. I was teaching a class and one of the IT folks happened by and looked in the window. 10 minutes later my phone was ringing and emails were flying in. No dual booting, Linux in a VM if I want and they need to install it.
  I use 3 things on that computer: Notepad++ (I had to ask them to install it because we're not allowed to d ha ourselves), Firefox, and MuPDF (also needed to ask permission for that one). Now, I can't complain too much because they gifted the teachers the previous laptops, so I'm assuming they'll do the same again and it will be mine.

You know... It would be really useful to have a tool (software or usb stick) that can detect all kinds of commonly used boss-ware and tell you what exactly is being monitored/captured by what exact software. Sounds like a business I'd like working for

Companies that employ this tech probably also block USB peripherals (besides input devices)
- The USD stick can be a rubber ducky :) acting as an input device to do its magic
  Anyways, dreams dreams

Can you give specific instructions on how to check please?
- Open window, look outside. If you see Australia or America, your boss is spying on you
What's it called under windows services?

How can I check if my laptop has such software installed?

If it's a work laptop, treat it like it has tracking software on it. Don't use your work computer for personal stuff that you don't want your employer to see. Period.
- Well, thx. But this was not my question.
You'd have to disable IME for Intel or the equivalent for AMD and then reinstall the OS.
However you might simply want to run some rootkit detecting tools, check what programs and drivers you have installed and look up each one, and browser extensions.