Bossware rises as employers keep closer tabs on remote staff (www.theregister.com)

Post-pandemic demand for remote and hybrid work has spurred rapid growth in “bossware”: employee-monitoring platforms that log websites and app use, keystrokes and mouse movement, file transfers, chat activity—and in some cases gait, facial cues or webcam images. Vendors aggregate this telemetry into dashboards, automatically flag anomalies or burnout via AI, and produce productivity metrics that companies use to reallocate resources, cut software waste, or enforce hours. Market estimates put dedicated bossware at $587M in 2024 with projections to $1.4B within seven years; surveys suggest monitoring is already widespread (roughly a third of UK managers, and studies reporting 60–74%+ employer tracking in the U.S.). For AI/ML practitioners the story matters beyond market growth: bossware relies on behavioral classifiers and anomaly-detection models that can mislabel offline but legitimate work, produce biased or opaque scores, and encourage “gaming” of metrics. Research and worker polls link monitoring to worse morale, higher turnover intentions and poorer mental health (e.g., monitored workers report higher feelings of being micromanaged and negative mental-health impacts). Legal responses are uneven—some disclosure laws exist, and calls for stronger privacy, transparency and human-in-the-loop safeguards are growing. The technical takeaways: prioritize interpretability, fairness audits, privacy-preserving telemetry, clear opt-in/notice practices and limits on automated disciplinary use when deploying workplace-monitoring AI.