I work for a fortune 200. Don’t work as many hours as they think. I’m guessing Microsoft is selling them tools to monitor my activity. Anyone have first hand knowledge?
The day my boss comes to me with this kind of data and asks what I am doing is the day I quit. I am a Sr. Cloud Architect and most of my time is putting together project plans and reading customer requests. I may actually spend about 30 - 45 minutes a day moving my mouse or typing on my keyboard, but all of my projects are up to date or ahead of schedule.
I bought a mouse mover* because I work from home and I regularly have builds that take 15 minutes to an hour to complete and I don’t see the point in sitting there and moving the mouse. Nobody has asked me about my irregular mouse movements.
* Don’t buy anything that plugs into your work laptop. What I got is just a little seat for the mouse to sit on that has a moving piece so the mouse thinks it’s moving. The device itself just needs USB power which I pull from the wall.
Assume that everything you do on your corp laptop is tracked, monitored and controlled. It’s their laptop really.
Whether your company uses this information is another story but they likely have it.
I wrote corporate spyware for years.
One of my friends got into a situation with another co-worker. For some reason HR was afraid to reprimanded the co-worker so they tried to find excuses fire my friend. In one meeting with HR my friend was asked about some aggressive comment he allegedly made. My friend was confused because that comment was made by his friend, at his own house. Even though he’s not a remote worker, the company used the laptop to spy on him after hours in his own home.
There’s lots of ways to do it, I work for a very large bank reviewing legal documents. I’m expected to be available for inbound calls for a certain percentage of my day. The phone software we use shows all that.
There are tools deployed like ActiveTrak (or innacuratly Aternity) that monitor activity and can screenshot desktops etc. Basically assume you are being clock-watched by your corporate devices.
Usually it is your vpn and security scanning software that can register your every move. Zscaler and that stuff.
There are countless tools, it all depends on how much they want to spend on it.
If they get serious about it they will require your webcam to be on and use facial detection.
They can have designated people remote into your work computer and watch the screen activity. Typically if they are doing this it would be part of help desk and it would be a couple of people quickly looping through dozens and dozens of other employees. You wouldn’t be able to tell someone was looking at your screen without using some sort of packet sniffing.
Microsoft might be doing it but if you have a work computer, which work issued to you, then they probably installed security software on it and mobile device management. These are legitimate tools to help protect company information incase of loss of theft but they can also be used to remotely install software, read the contents of anything on the device, log keystrokes and mouse movement, and activate any connected peripheral. There’s a dozen big name companies a fortune 200 company might purchase this kind of software from.
I’m tired of working 
Get yourself one of these!
I work in brand protection and data analytics and they use “Active Trak” pretty sure is what it’s called
I work in IT for a Fortune 500, we have screen recording for call center people, but otherwise, we just use web traffic monitoring and SIEM stuff for security reasons. We aren’t super big on productivity tracking for the most part, though the idea has been floated dozens of times at this point t.
When the pandemic hit and we worked from home, my boss asked me what I thought of monitoring software. I told him flat out that I wouldn’t do it. If you don’t trust your emoyees to get there work done then they shouldn’t be employees. Also added that it’s a failure of management if they need to monitor that closely. It was the last I heard on the subject. I’m also the only IT guy so I know they didn’t have someone else just do it. Because I checked every day on all the computers for new software.
Do you seriously have to be doing something ALL THE TIME you’re at work? And are they monitoring it? I’d quit in a heartbeat!
Work for a large insurance company. Can confirm every movement you or any employee make is monitored and recorded. It’s then shown to us in reports showing how much time in each app and doing whatever.
Sentinel One is for antivirus and security, but it’s quite invasive and could have tracking features, or features that could be twisted in tracking you.
If you have outlook there will be telemetry from that, same with office 365. There’s also an agent on your workstation that can monitor when anything is launched or installed on your computer
I forgot the name of the software, but someone high up in management at my job, and I play video games on the company time. Yes, i am aware of the irony here. We were looking through what information is being tracked so we can work around it. The app being used was checking what apps are the main window and how long. It reported that in very fancy graphs as well, but I don’t recall any counters that check if you are actually doing anything in those apps.
A technological rat.