Employee Surveillance Technologies: Prevalence, Classification, and Invasiveness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The pandemic-generated shift to remote work, along with the increasing datafication of work processes, has triggered an unprecedented raise in the use of employee surveillance technologies. Although the literature on worker surveillance and control is rich and multifaceted, it still lacks a clear portrait of these technologies and their prevalence. This paper (a) reviews the academic and grey literatures to document the prevalence of employee surveillance technologies, (b) classifies employee surveillance technologies based on their material features, proposing twenty-one forms grouped in three categories, and (c) provides exploratory data that position these twenty-one forms on a spectrum ranging from the least to the most invasive on the personal and social levels. The documentation of prevalence, classification work, and the spectrum of personal and social invasiveness contribute to different streams of scientific literature and have important practical implications for workers, employers, policy makers, and unions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.059 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".