Virginia Doellgast

Professor of Employment Relations and Dispute Resolution

Virginia Doellgast, professor of employee relations in the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, is currently studying the impact of digitalization and AI on job quality.

Doellgast says:

“Software that tracks keystrokes and mouse movements is not new. It has been used in call centers and back office jobs for a long time as part of performance management systems, to track worker productivity and to inform training and performance evaluations. Their use was expanded with the shift to remote work and work from home, as a way to monitor employee activity in the absence of direct supervision.

“In these settings, workers have also already been ‘training their replacements’ – as employers use a range of data generated by workers to train or correct AI-based technologies like chatbots/voicebots and robotic process automation tools (e.g. recordings of their calls and chats, as well as tracking of data entry, finance and accounting, and IT and coding tasks).

“At the same time, Meta’s new policy to install tracking software to train AI models on the daily work of employees intensifies these trends – and it does raise several concerns. First, consent and compensation: workers are producing additional value for their employers – are they being compensated for this, and are they given a choice to opt in or opt out? Probably not, but in a unionized workplace this would be a topic unions would probably raise in negotiations. Second, data privacy: particularly the screen capture part of the software could capture personal employee data. We have weak rights on data privacy in the U.S., but in other countries there are clear rights protecting personal data in the workplace.

“In Europe, Meta’s use of these tools for training AI would probably not be possible, because of the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). Monitoring must be ‘necessary and proportional’ to the aim – and tracking every mouse move or keystroke is typically not viewed as proportional. Screen capture has been seen as particularly problematic. See this article outlining a Norwegian case, where a telecom company’s use of screen capture was ruled to violate data protection rights.”