TCS Laptop Tracking Raises New Workplace Privacy Questions

While your office laptop is busy aiding you in completing your regular tasks for the day, it might be working much harder than what meets the eye. TCS has allegedly implemented the Digital User Experience Monitoring software on their company laptops, which is now threatening the privacy of employees at work. According to reports, the software has the ability to give visibility into the applications accessed by employees and the amount of time spent on them. Though such technology can help organizations identify security threats and manage IT systems, it poses a major question how much monitoring of employees is being done through it.




Monitoring of corporate devices is done by companies in order to keep the information secure and ensure the security of their IT systems. For an organization like TCS, which handles confidential information for its customers from different industries and countries, cyber security becomes a major issue.


The official security policy of TCS states that safeguarding information, whether business-sensitive or personal, is crucial for the company and its customers. Their security architecture consists of information security, cybersecurity and personnel security measures.


Thus, from this point of view, monitoring of company-owned laptops is justified and can be done for cybersecurity reasons. Yet questions arise in case the company starts to monitor not only for cybersecurity but also for the behavior of individuals.


There are claims about the Digital User Experience Monitoring solution that indicate that the solution is able to reveal which applications the employees use and how much time is spent on each of them.

This is a key difference.

Having information about the opening of certain applications by an employee is not the same thing as knowing what the employee does in these applications. In the same way, tracking of application usage is not equal to the company being able to have access to the contents that appear in the applications.

Unfortunately, there is no information available on the features of the discussed TCS monitoring system. Such information as details about the software vendor, the types of collected data and its access is unavailable.

In such a situation, employees might have many questions concerning the scope of the monitoring.

The discussion becomes even more complex where the same data can be utilized for various purposes.

For instance, the information related to applications usage can be used by an IT department to diagnose software problems. The same information, however, may be interpreted as an indicator of employee productivity.

This is the reason why transparency is crucial.

Employees should be aware of what information is collected, for what purposes, who has access to the information, and how long the information is kept. Employees may also require understanding of whether the monitoring is continued after using a corporate laptop during non-working hours.

From the available reports, it appears that TCS has not yet officially clarified anything on the vendor of the software as well as its capabilities and the access to data from it.

Proper communication might solve most of the issues.

In case the major objective of the technology is cybersecurity, then TCS might explain what threats this technology is designed to detect and what information will be required for this. In case the application usage data is also collected for operation, then the employees might wish to be certain that this data will not affect their evaluations.

It might help to safeguard the company’s systems while keeping employees' trust.


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