An Australian compliance training company has been accused of turning the laptops of its workers into listening devices to surveil them while they worked from home.

Online compliance training provider Safetrac deployed employee monitoring software earlier this year that recorded the audio and screens of some of its workers, which picked up online team meetings and conversations that took place near to the laptop.

Safetrac has said this surveillance was done with a “legitimate business purpose” and that all its employees consented to it when they signed a new surveillance policy.

This will now be tested at a Fair Work Commission unfair dismissal case brought forward by a Safetrac employee who complained about the surveillance, while the issue has also been raised with Victoria Police, WorkSafe and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC).

Remote monitoring

According to a report in the Australian Financial Review, Safetrac notified its employees of more computer monitoring and surveillance at an all-staff meeting in February.

In mid-April, the company then deployed software developed by Teramind, which offers employee monitoring tools, capable of monitoring up to 10 of its employees at any one time.

This saw their work-issued laptops’ microphones used to capture audio by default, and their screens recorded.

Safetrac said that in the case of one of its employees, the software revealed that they were idle on their laptop for half of their working day, and their recorded work conversations reinforced that they had “limited productivity”.

The US-based Teramind provides real-time tools that track employee activity and usage across devices, including through screenshots, screen recordings, keystrokes and app usage.

In mid-June, two Safetrac employees alleged breaches of their privacy over the use of these tools, according to the Australian Financial Review (AFR).

Soon after doing so, the workers said they were locked out of the company’s systems without notice and sacked within weeks.

In one of the termination letters, seen by the AFR, Safetrac acknowledged it had “downloaded and deployed Teramind into Safetrac’s system and onto Safetrac-issued devices” in mid-April.

The company said that the recordings made by this software were listened to directly by Safetrac’s CEO, but this was done for a “legitimate business purpose” and that workers had earlier in the year agreed to “additional employee computer monitoring and surveillance”.

The two workers have now lodged unlawful dismissal cases with the Fair Work Commission and made complaints to the police and the OAIC.

The rise of workplace surveillance

Concerns over where the line is when it comes to businesses surveilling their own staff have grown in recent years with the rapid increase in the number of employees working remotely and from home.

This has seen organisations trying to make sure that their workers are still being productive and turning to technology to do so.

In some cases this has led to a cat-and-mouse game between workers and their bosses, with the use of “bossware” tools to surveil workers and the rise in tools that can fake productivity, such as “mouse-mover” tools.

In Victoria, a parliamentary committee released a report on workplace surveillance in May, finding that this is harming employees and that the current laws have not kept pace with this issue.

The report found that some Australian companies are requiring the use of apps that continuously hoover up private data on workers, an artificial intelligence model that analyses facial expressions to determine whether someone is concentrating and neurotechnology tools that claim to determine someone’s level of attention.

The committee called for new workplace surveillance laws that require all monitoring to be reasonable, necessary and proportionate to achieve a legitimate aim, and for workers to be notified of and consulted about any workplace surveillance practices.