Corrections & Clarifications: An earlier version of this story misspelled Brian Kropp's name.
If you're concerned about being tracked by Facebook and Google when you're out and aboutand by stores when you enter their retail environment, get used to it.
Because, at work, your employer is probably doing it nowand will be even more active very soon.
"This is the modern workplace now," says Brian Kropp, a group vice president with business consultancy Gartner. "If you work at a medium to large-sized company, the odds are the different behaviors you engage in will be tracked by your employer, generated and collected by somebody in the organization," he says.
By 2020, some 80% of businesses will be monitoring employees, using a range of tools and data sources, according to Gartner. This is up from 50% currentlyand just 30% in 2015. Gartner surveyed 239 "large" corporations to come up with its conclusions.
If you work on a company-issued computer or phone and access the firm's network, "they can get access," says Kropp.
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When the subject is broached with people, they tend to get defensive and worry about Big Brother, says Kropp, until he explains why the companies are doing this.
It's the Glass Door effect. Think of it as another variation of those surveys firms send out to see how staffers feel about them. They are looking to monitor e-mail, texts, social media exchanges and our movements to gauge happiness, says Kropp.
"Thevast majority of companies using this type of information are doing it to better understand their employees and create a better environment," he says.
Privacy advocates are appalled.
"Employees should be extremely concerned," says Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
He notes that recent scandals involving bothdata breaches (Yahoo, Capital One, Equinox, Facebook) have made people more concerned about their privacy, and how Google and Facebook track their every move, in a bid to sell targeted, personalized advertising.
"But when people think about what Facebook and Google know about them, it’s not usually connected to workplace surveillance, except to the extent that employers might retaliate against them for what they do in their non-work lives," Tien adds.
How they're tracking us:
• E-mail, text messages and inter-office communication programs like Slack and Microsoft Teams: Kropp says companies anonymize the data, and "scrape" it to get a sense of whether workers are happy at work. They also look for trends, such as when employees log in and log out, to get a read on their time management. Are they spending too many hours at night responding to e-mails? "That's a bad indicator," says Kropp.
• Biometrics: Some companies have started using the webcams on laptops to "track facial expressions," Kropp says, "to see if people feel frustrated at work." Others have put digital devices under conference room tablesas a way of sensing body temperaturesand whether people are coming into the room to use it.
• Calendars: They check the programs to see who's meeting with whom.
• Microchipping: A Wisconsin firm in 2017 picked up worldwide headlines when it asked employees to let them insert microchips in their bodies. The firm, Three Square Market, said it was to make it easier for employees to get in and out, without having to scan their badges, and instead just wave their hands. But the concept hasn't caught on. Since then, only four other firms have offeredmicrochippingto their workers, and one of them, a Mexican firm, did it to keep track of top execsin case they were kidnapped, "so they would know how to find them," says Kropp.
• Movements: In February, co-working space WeWork bought the startup Euclid, which tracks the number of people who attend company meetings, using Wi-Fi to monitor them.
"Tracking employees as they go about their workdays presents obvious privacy concerns," noted Betsy Mikel, content strategist,inthe publicationInc. "Frankly, it's creepy."
Kropp says the most popular form of tracking now is simply monitoring badge swipes in and out of the building, followed by when you log in and out to your work computer and analyzing your calendar and e-mail activity.
In our personal lives, when we go into a store, everything is being tracked by marketing firms to better understand the customer experience," Kropp says. "Now it's coming to the employee experience."
But there are simple ways to see whether your employer or school is monitoring your iPhone. Apple spells it out on a help page. In Settings, General, on the top of the page it will say, "This iPhone is supervised and managed by" the organization.
You can go to Settings, General, Profiles and Device Management to see how they are monitoring the phone.
For Android phones, Google allows organizations to "manage, secure, and monitor," activity, even if they're not on company-issued devices. But the employer has to subscribeto Google's G Suite enterprise software suite.
Google says it can:
• "Restrict access to device settings and features, such as mobile networks, Wi-Fi, screen capturesand more.
• Monitor compliance with policies you set, and get reports about users, devicesand OS versions."
Discovering that the company has control of your phone on Android is tougher than with iOS, but Privacyrights.org notes, "You should ask your employer for more information on the company policy around managed mobile devices."
Follow USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham (@jeffersongraham) on Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.
