Inside the grim world of office spyware

In the space of seven days this month, the chief executive of one global company worked for more than 57 hours, or an average of eight hours a day.

He slept for almost exactly the same number of hours. Family and friends got a more meagre 17 hours of his time and he devoted an even more measly three hours to relaxing and having fun.

I know all this because the chief executive was the 34-year-old Kamil Rudnicki, and he revealed it in a post on LinkedIn.

As well he might. Rudnicki is the founder of TimeCamp, a company he set up in his home country of Poland that sells what it calls time-tracking software and the rest of us call workplace spyware, bossware or tattleware.

These Big Brotherish apps can monitor the websites workers visit and the programs they use to tally up how much time is spent on, say, Twitter vs Excel — even if people are working at home, as many more are thanks to Covid. Some apps can also log workers’ keystrokes and physical whereabouts, or take screenshots of their screen.

Rudnicki’s company made headlines around the world this month when a civil tribunal in Canada ruled an accountant owed her old employer more than C$2,700 (£1,630) after TimeCamp showed she had committed “time theft”.

The accountant had logged just over 50 hours of work that her employer said did not appear to have been spent on “work-related tasks”. She protested she had spent a lot of time working on paper copies of client documents that would not have been spotted by the TimeCamp software installed on her work laptop.

But her bosses said TimeCamp could show the time she had spent printing and its data revealed she could not have printed the large pile of documents she would have needed to work on hard copies.

Also, she would have had to upload the work she did offline into the company’s computer system, and TimeCamp didn’t show she had done that either.

It looked like a clear win for the spyware versus the human, which made me wonder how TimeCamp felt about its role in this emerging era of worker surveillance.

A bit mixed, is the impression I got from speaking to TimeCamp’s Rudnicki last week.

On the upside, the Canadian accountant’s case had boosted business at his company, whose 50 employees serve about 4,000 clients in sectors such as software, consulting and business-to-business professional services.

“For us, it’s good publicity,” he says, explaining that requests for customer demonstrations of…