Your boss’s monitoring app didn’t just watch you — it shared your data to Facebook and a Russian search engine

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence and data science have allowed employers to create extensive data sets, or "dossiers," on their workers. These data sets can be used to punish employees or attempt to predict their behavior. According to a nonprofit helping workers organize, many employers have shared employee names, emails, and other personal data with hundreds of outside data brokers and technology companies without clearly disclosing the practice.

Vanderbilt University, Northeastern University, and UC Berkeley conducted an investigation, finding that nine popular monitoring platforms shared identifying worker data with external companies, including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and the ad-tech firm AppLovin. Additionally, these platforms sent workers' online activity, IP addresses, device information, and browsing data to 145 third-party domains, including Yandex, a Russian search engine.

Data privacy experts and workers warn of the risks associated with employer surveillance, emphasizing the importance of workers teaming up to advocate for themselves. Unionization efforts have been attempted, but some employers track, rank, and score employees in ways that are not transparent to workers. Awareness of surveillance tools is growing, and some workers are questioning what personal information is being collected and how it's being used.