Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has reportedly deployed a Digital User Experience Monitoring tool on laptops issued to its employees, potentially giving the company unprecedented visibility into how its workforce uses corporate devices.
Sources cited by Moneycontrol said the software allows TCS to view which applications employees access on their devices and how much time is spent on them. Moneycontrol reported that it could not independently establish whether the monitoring tool installed on employee laptops is connected to TCS's Zscaler-powered Workspace Experience Studio offering.
In a statement given to India Today Tech, the company dismissed the reports as baseless and said it does not monitor the individual activity of employees on their laptops, adding that employee privacy is respected.
TCS handles sensitive information belonging to banks, financial institutions, healthcare companies, governments and multinational corporations, and endpoint monitoring can help identify malware, detect unusual activity, investigate security incidents and prevent confidential information from being transferred outside corporate systems.
While such software can help protect sensitive corporate and client data, its ability to track application usage and activity could also be misused for productivity assessments, appraisals or disciplinary action.
For employees, there is a difference between monitoring a laptop to keep it secure and monitoring an individual's activities to measure their performance , a distinction that becomes more sensitive when information such as application usage or working patterns can potentially be connected to a particular employee.
Legal scholars point out that the absence of explicit statutory frameworks governing workplace surveillance in India leaves employees with limited protection when corporations institute such systems.
Employee monitoring software is not new to the technology services industry. Last year, Cognizant faced scrutiny over its use of ProHance, a workforce management platform capable of tracking login times, application usage, website activity and periodic activity checks.
According to the report, monitoring employee activity across a workforce approaching 600,000 employees could present significant operational and data management challenges.
