Opinion: Bosses are striking back at workers who use mouse jigglers

Opinion by Jeff Yang

(CNN) — Workplaces often boast that they treat their employees “like family.” That sounds great — until you think about how you’re treated by your actual family: annoying siblings who keep borrowing your stuff without asking? That weird uncle no one wants to talk to — or about? Overbearing parents with too-high expectations?

Yep, work can feel almost exactly like family. Especially the last bit: Corporate America is obsessed with ensuring their employees are staying productive when they’re working remotely, away from the gimlet eyes of management. Which is why when Bloomberg reported this month that Wells Fargo fired over a dozen employees for “simulation of keyboard activity,” (in other words, faking that they were online) it should have surprised nobody.

It’s easy to imagine the types of pretend productivity gadgets these employees might have used: “mouse jigglers,” gizmos with a questionable name that make random, small motions of a mouse or touchpad. They’re intended to keep devices from going to sleep during during periods of inactivity, such as long downloads, but are frequently used by workers who are AFK (away from keyboard) to appear to be diligently toiling away. Or perhaps keystroke simulators, which, as the label reads, simulate keyboard strokes.

For Wells Fargo, firing about a dozen staffers out of a workforce of some 200,000  isn’t exactly going to make a difference in the commercial outlook of America’s third-largest bank by assets.  But this move isn’t really about commerce — it’s about control. And Wells Fargo’s crackdown on these gadgets is just the latest attempt by big business to rein in perceived slacking by remote employees.

Nearly 4 in 10 managers in one Harvard Business Review study doubted their remote reports’ diligence, expressing the belief that employees perform worse when left to their own devices at home. Perhaps they’re not entirely wrong: In one survey by Intuit, over three-quarters of remote employees admitted to at least sometimes taking care of personal tasks during the workday.

But most workers responding to the survey said that they averaged 45 minutes or less of daily me-time, while most employers estimated that more than half of remote employees are engaged in an hour or more time theft per day. That perceptual gap reflects a vast and growing mutual distrust between workers and employers in America.

According to a study by the security platform Cerby, only 20% of employees say they have a high level of trust in their managers, which is bad. Not as bad, however, as a Microsoft survey about hybrid work productivity, which revealed that a meager 12% of managers “have full confidence their team is productive.” This level of paranoia that has seemingly led corporations to invest in a wide array of incredibly creepy ways to surveil, curtail and lock down workers, what the tech industry refers to as “bossware.”

When installed on a worker’s computer or mobile device, these tools can invisibly monitor and, as necessary, restrict activity that companies judge to be wasteful, unproductive or otherwise out of bounds. Some bossware apps secretly capture screenshots of employee monitors; others track employee location and movement. The most extreme apps can actually remotely take over laptop webcams, allowing employers to capture live video or audio of employees and their surroundings, a gross invasion of privacy with the potential to be wildly embarrassing.

But digital privacy advocates Electronic Frontier Foundation point out that, as noxious as it is, many forms of bossware are entirely legal.  Under the current laws in most states your employer has the right to install on company-provided equipment whatever tools it deems necessary to ensure that you’re working hard and refraining from wasteful, risky or illicit behavior. (New York, Connecticut and Delaware do require employers to notify you first.)

If those tools keep you fettered to your desk like a beast of burden, emit a piercing shriek when you fail to generate 350 lines of optimized code per hour or accidentally capture your spouse walking through the living room wearing only a hand towel, there’s little you can do— short of quitting. Right?

Well…that’s where active countermeasures like mouse jigglers, keystroke simulators and Zoom presence spoofers come in. They’re how workers are battling back against boardroom Big Brother, in a technological arms race that’s only getting wilder as devices get more sophisticated.

As companies deploy facial recognition software to ensure that remote workers are attentive during meetings, employees might counter with deepfake persona masks that present an awake and alert version of their own faces for Zoom while they lean back and get their Zzzzz’s. As companies assign mandatory productivity quotas, enforced by virtual hustle bots that encourage workers to spend more time in “the zone,” employees might outsource their work to generative AI and elaborate chatbots. And as companies deploy algorithmic social-media analytics to see if their workers are dissatisfied and looking for a fresh employment, employees will get new gigs and keep their old ones, working two — or more — full-time jobs at once.

These small acts of techno-resistance don’t offer a solution for everyone, of course. For example, as I’ve learned firsthand, no amount of mouse-jiggling helps you get your CNN op-ed completed by deadline. On the other hand, large language models don’t yet have the chops to write a great opinion essay (at least not to my standards — or my editor’s). Which means that for now, anyway, I get to stay in the “family” without having to engage in a dystopian cat and mouse game of surveillance and subterfuge.

But maybe I’ll keep that piece of masking tape on my webcam… just in case.

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