The high-tech spying boss
Thursday, 18 October 2007
Last Updated: Friday, 26 October 2007
By Brendan Lewis
No one wants to spy on their employees do they? I don't. But just the other day I decided to invest in a digital voice recorder and purchased the Olympus WS-331M, a tiny little device capable of picking up most speakers in a conference.
While fiddling with it to determine what it can and can't do, we discovered that it is small and light enough to slip unnoticed into a shirt pocket, and able to record conversations. We can then plug it straight into the PC and treat it as a USB memory stick to store conversations in WMA format.
Kind of cool. I could be nasty and record conversations with staff on the sly. Which then made me start to wonder – what technology is now available to use if I truly were a bastard boss?
Now I am not making any recommendations on how you should go about your business, or even the legal status, but looking around I came up with some nasty uses of technology that I thought I'd share. Of course these devices can be used to make your businesses more productive, efficient, safer and save you costs – and not just for spying.
Oh, and it’s also nice for employees to know what we bastard bosses might be up to.
Here are the top 15 ways bosses might spy on employees.
In the car
GPS
Sat Nav and GPS are now readily available for vehicles as either aftermarket or part of the standard package. This technology, although handy for the average punter, can also be used by the bastard boss. Companies such as Quicktrack and GPS for Fleet allow you to know where your vehicles are at all times.
Black boxes
In the trucking industry, vehicles have been monitored for more than just location for some time. Products such as Environav let you look at anything you want to that has a sensor attached, such as vehicle speed, engine speed, time of use, deviation from routes. This technology is now starting to be packaged as standard into some vehicles. So you can monitor your staff at all times when they are out and about, and can get SMS or email notifications when they are not behaving themselves in your vehicle.
On foot?
Of course if you want to know where your people are once they have got out of the car, why not try the Benefon Track 1 mobile phone. It may not have a camera or sweet multimedia capabilities, but it does have a built-in GPS device. It lets you locate it to within 50 metres – which could be disappointing for staff if they tell you they are looking for a parking spot when they are actually still at home.
In the office
Office-cam
Anywhere you have power, you can now put a wireless IP camera such as this d-link job. Connect this camera to your wireless network, and you can view (or record!) what's happening from anywhere in the world. In fact I know someone that drove his staff mad by constantly watching his programmers' effectiveness every time he went on a sales trip to the US.
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