David, 23, admits that he felt a twinge of relief when the first wave of Covid-19 shut down his Arlington, Virginia, office. A recent college graduate, he was new to the job and struggled to click with his teammates. Maybe, he thought, this would be a nice break from “the face-to-face stuff”: the office politics and small talk. (His name has been changed for this story.)

“I couldn’t have been more wrong,” David says.

That’s because, within their first week of remote work, David and his team were introduced to a digital surveillance platform called Sneek.

Every minute or so, the program would capture a live photo of David and his workmates via their company laptop webcams. The ever-changing headshots were splayed across the wall of a digital conference waiting room that everyone on the team could see. Clicking on a colleague’s face would unilaterally pull them into a video call. If you were lucky enough to catch someone goofing off [or doing something untoward], you could forward the offending image to a team chat via Sneek’s integration with the messaging platform Slack.... Read More: The Guardian