Performance and Productivity Monitoring

Employers and school administrators have turned to new tools during the pandemic to monitor the work and learning of workers and students. Although some schools and employers used productivity monitoring tools before COVID-19, the pandemic has made these tools more widespread.¹ Workers are facing different levels and types of surveillance depending on whether their job is white-collar or blue-collar. Wilneida Negrón explained during our panel, “We're seeing a segmentation of the workplace, the labor market in terms of essential workers, those workers that are working from home which are much more professional, and then you have the unemployed. And each of those types of workers are experiencing a different type of technology.” Further, workers in low-wage jobs have been subject to the most extensive surveillance both before² and during the pandemic.³ As explained by Sarah David Heydemann, senior counsel for Education and Workplace Justice at National Women’s Law Center, during our panel, “We see the effects of these privacy violations playing out even more harshly on communities that have traditionally been marginalized in different ways in the workforce.”

Employers who originally present tools to workers as health measures may also use the tools to monitor worker productivity. Marketing material for workplace wearables tends to blur the line between the tools’ public health and productivity functions.⁴ As explained by Negrón during our panel, “We’ve been noticing for over five years the increasing use of workforce management surveillance technologies. What we’re seeing now is not only an increased safety need, but also the sophistication of these new technologies.”

The pandemic has accelerated the use of surveillance technologies in both K-12 and higher education settings, and across different industries. This section will focus on two technologies that experienced rapid expansion since March of 2020: exam proctoring software and device monitoring software. Each discussion will begin by explaining the motivations universities and employers have for using these tools, describe the response from students and workers, and examine how criticism was received by school administrations, workplaces, and vendors. It will conclude by making recommendations to schools and workplaces.

The transition to remote learning has increased concerns about academic integrity, which schools have tried to address using exam proctoring software. There are many vendors providing proctoring services to academic institutions at all levels, including Proctorio,⁵ ProctorU,⁶ Honorlock,⁷ Examity,⁸ and Respondus.⁹ The pandemic has accelerated demand for proctoring services: In May of 2020, Proctorio reported that business had increased 900 percent after campuses began closing.¹⁰ During the panel, Chief Privacy Officer and Director of Policy and Governance at UCLA Kent Wada expressed the concerns of professors and administrators: “There’s been a huge spike over the last several months in academic dishonesty cases. . . how do you deal with this? Integrity is such a cornerstone [of the university].” According to ProctorU data, rates of cheating on the exams that it proctored increased approximately eight-fold with the onset of the pandemic,¹¹ and the vendors’ assertions that cheating has become more common have further increased the demand for their services.¹² While it is clear that virtual learning increases the challenges of proctoring exams to ensure academic integrity, critics have questioned the reliability of the methods used to detect cheating.

The proctoring software many universities use relies on a combination of facial recognition and eye-movement tracking that poses privacy and equity threats. The technology has disparate impacts on students of color and students with disabilities. Studies show that facial recognition technology is significantly less accurate for people of color, and its use in school proctoring software has created difficulties for students with darker skin. Honorlock, a popular exam proctoring service, is powered by Amazon’s controversial AI facial recognition system Rekognition.¹³ In June of 2020, Amazon announced a one-year moratorium¹⁴ on police use of Rekognition due to studies showing it misidentified people of color at higher rates than white people,¹⁵ but has not stopped its use in education.

The risks of inaccuracy are greater in the law enforcement context where systems seek to identify an unknown individual with a one-to-many match, than in the one-to-one matching context of verifying that a particular exam-taker is the correct person. However, there are nonetheless multiple examples of inaccuracy in the exam proctoring context that are posing serious obstacles to students in online-only environments. Most proctoring software verifies that the correct person is sitting for an exam by using facial recognition to match the student’s face with their photo ID, and failure to match can prevent students from taking exams or require students to take exams under uncomfortable conditions. For example, a Black student had to shine a bright light on her face throughout an entire exam so the software could recognize her¹⁶ and an Arab-American law graduate tried 75 times to verify his identity but the bar exam software could not recognize him.¹⁷ As Anisha Reddy noted during our panel, “It's unacceptable for a tool that requires video to recognize a student’s face to not recognize a Black student’s face, because these decisions that these tools can make are really going to impact a student's future.”

Proctoring software has also been found to erroneously flag neuro-atypical and disabled students for cheating because of their irregular eye movements or hyperactivity.¹⁸ The programs assume that students who move often are looking away from the screen to read prohibited materials.¹⁹ A test-taker’s suspicion level is calculated by whether the movements taken during an exam fall outside the standard deviation.²⁰ Students with autism or other neuro-atypical attributes, visual impairments, neuromuscular disorders, or any medical reason requiring administering medication or using the restroom frequently during exams all fall outside the standard deviation, and are flagged by algorithmic systems.²¹ Kent Wada underscored the importance of focusing on the disparate impacts of privacy violations on marginalized groups during our panel, “When you think about privacy, there's a really big area of exploration that we can still look forward to at the intersection of equity and inclusion, particularly and certainly diversity.”

Students have protested the use of exam proctoring software for a number of reasons, including the technology’s disparate impacts on students of color and students with disabilities, accessibility issues for students with unreliable internet access, and the stressful environment created by surveillance.²² Many have taken collective action to petition school administrators for more equitable learning conditions, collecting signatures and writing open letters.²³ Searches for Proctorio, ProctorU, HonorLock, and other exam-proctoring companies on Change.org will return dozens of petitions organized by students opposing their school’s use of the software.²⁴

Some college administrations have been responsive to student concerns about the privacy and equity problems created by exam proctoring software. After students at the City University of New York collected over 28,000 signatures²⁵ petitioning the administration to stop using Proctortrack, the university announced it would change its plans to use methods of assessment that did not require the software.²⁶ Further, the University of California, Berkeley prohibited instructors from using online proctoring services because the administration was “unable to find a viable option that would address student privacy concerns and accommodations.”²⁷

However, some vendors have retaliated against students and staff who criticize their exam proctoring software. After a computer science student criticized Proctorio on Twitter and posted an analysis of its code on Pastebin, the company banned his IP address and the CEO sent him a message threatening legal action if he did not remove his posts.²⁸ Additionally, ProctorU threatened to sue faculty members at the University of California, Santa Barbara who sent a letter to the administration raising concerns with the company’s data-sharing practices and asking the university to terminate its contract with the company.²⁹ Finally, Proctorio sued a university staff member after he posted links to videos that the company showed instructors to draw public attention to the company’s practices.³⁰

Just as the shift to remote education has caused greater concern about academic integrity, the shift to remote work has caused concerns about worker productivity, leading some employers to turn to monitoring technology. Early in the pandemic, surveys found that 40 percent of managers expressed low confidence in their ability to remotely manage their workers³¹ and 78 percent of business leaders believed that the shift to hybrid or remote work would negatively impact worker productivity.³² However, evidence of remote work’s impact on productivity is varied and context-dependent.³³ One study found an increase in productivity for knowledge workers who began working remotely during the pandemic,³⁴ but another study found a precipitous drop in productivity with the transition to remote work.³⁵ The global demand for employee monitoring software increased by 87 percent in April 2020.³⁶ The rush to adapt to the pandemic in 2020 has caused some employers to overlook privacy and security issues with remote monitoring tools. According to the International Association of Privacy Professionals, about 60 percent of employers that have adopted new technology during the pandemic have expedited or skipped entirely privacy and security reviews.³⁷

Many employers have required remote workers to install activity-tracking software that uses keystroke loggers, cameras, and screen sharing.³⁸ These vendors include StaffCop,³⁹ Teramind,⁴⁰ Hubstaff,⁴¹ CleverControl,⁴² and Time Doctor.⁴³ Hubstaff gives workers “productivity scores” in 10-minute increments based on the percentage of time spent typing.⁴⁴ Other software takes periodic screenshots and photos of employees to send to their managers.⁴⁵

Unsurprisingly, these surveillance tools are generally not popular with employees⁴⁶ because they violate privacy and exacerbate challenges caused by the pandemic. The monitoring of remote workers has disproportionately impacted people with childcare responsibilities, including helping children with remote learning, who are more likely to be women.⁴⁷ During our panel, Sarah David Heydemann noted that, “Reddit is full of work-from-home hacks for seeming like you’re still online … How [else] are you going to take breaks to breastfeed? How are you supposed to be watching your children that have their school lessons to attend to and show the same level of productivity? Oftentimes it just isn’t possible.”⁴⁸ Heydemann noted the findings of a National Women’s Law Center Study: “There were more than 1.1 million workers who were forced out of the labor force as a result of the pandemic and a full 80 percent of those were women.⁴⁹ Working women and Latinas were especially overrepresented in that number.” Working parents, particularly mothers, have needed extra support to manage childcare during the pandemic to sustain productivity, but instead many employers have tried to use surveillance.