Employee stunned after learning company spied on her laptop and used to it against them

The corporate world has long justified the way of treating employees as corporate capital. Oftentimes, the corporate world strips down its employees as mere resources, expecting targets to be reached on time, but providing no empathy for staying up late. However, how would you react if we told you that your company rebrands a system called 'corporate spying' in the name of innovation to make employees stay loyal rather than productive? One such experience shared on r/recruitinghell by Reddit user u/Imaginary_Addition21 on September 6 explores how a company used an unethical tactic to extract data and analyze every step taken by the employee online.

The Reddit post titled 'I worked at a company that used "predictive assessment tools" to secretly profile employees' encapsulates how the corporate world justifies using tools to weaponize personal data of employees. The user who had apparently worked in a company years ago shared the experience of his company using a 'predictive assessment tool' to silently flag employees who were considered at high flight risk. The Reddit user explained that the said tool used by the company monitored all the emails, Slack messages, calendar activity, and login patterns of every employee. "If you started logging in later, taking more time off, or your communication style changed, the algorithm flagged you," the user revealed.

The data obtained from the tool was weaponized by the company in flagging employees as potential flight risk, who would then be excluded from taking up important projects or other opportunities. Citing one example, the user wrote, "One colleague was removed from a major client project because she'd been searching industry salary benchmarks on her work laptop." Upon learning, the company justified the practice as 'resource allocation optimization,' when it was simply an unnecessary practice carried out to test employees' loyalty towards the company rather than assessing them based on their performance.

After the Reddit user left the job, he learned that he had been flagged by the company 6 months before he put his papers down, when he had updated his LinkedIn profile. The user found the truth at a holiday party after overhearing executives talk about 'retention prediction scores'. The user concludes by warning that corporate loyalty is rarely a two-way street. In a study conducted by Cella M. Sum, Caroline Shi, and Sarah E. Fox in May 2025, it was outlined that employees often report being unaware of the extent to which their activities are monitored. The study also raises significant questions about the justification of surveillance practices that prioritise the company's control over employees' well-being. The study echoes the extent to which unethical monitoring of employees' activities is common in the corporate world, as revealed by the Reddit user, who went on to recount another incident: "Same thing happened to my coworker, took a single day off to care for her sick kid, and suddenly got flagged. The worst part was how they pretended it was 'data driven' when it was just digital surveillance with a fancy name."

Soon after the post was shared on Reddit, many users came forward expressing their concerns over the invasion of one's privacy. u/ghostgurlboo wrote, "This. I don't do anything on my work laptop I do not expect to be seen. But this goes beyond that!" u/GargantuanCake writes, "Yeah this is going to end up creating negative feedback loops too. If anybody gets flagged and driven out of the company that's going to reinforce that pattern. Then they'll probably have the same thing happen at the next job which will get them labelled a job hopper." While many users questioned the system for not reprimanding such practices among corporate companies, users also pointed out companies for using legal loopholes in continuing these surveillance operations.

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