Monitoring people: mechanism, law and trust

This section covers monitoring aimed at people rather than at systems. It is the half of the subject where the mechanisms are simpler and the consequences are heavier, because the thing being measured can be harmed by the measurement.

The articles cover the four classes of tool and why the class decides the outcome, what is actually captured on a device, what notice and consent require in several jurisdictions, the gap between activity and productivity, what covert monitoring costs legally and culturally, who inside the company may look and for how long, and what observation does to the work being observed.

Three limits apply throughout and are worth stating once. Legal material names its jurisdiction, is general, and is not advice. We describe what tools record and what the law asks, and we do not describe how to monitor people without their knowledge, how to avoid a notification duty, or how to make capture hard to detect. And no product is named here; the selections do that, after the class of problem has been settled.

The thread from the first section applies with unusual force. Every measurement here is a proxy standing in for something nobody can observe directly, attached to a consequence for a person, which is exactly the arrangement the article on measures becoming targets describes.