Barclays Bank installed spy sensors to track employees' stay at workplaces / ITI Capital Blog

ITI_Capital August 25, 2017 at 11:07

Barclays Bank has installed spyware sensors to track employees' stay at workplaces

Image: Shannon McGee , CC BY-SA 2.0

Instruments are installed in the London branch of the bank that record the time employees are at work. According to Bloomberg, Barclays Plc employees have found unknown black boxes attached to desktops in recent months. For clarification, they turned to the leadership. It turned out that these are OccupEye tracking devices that record how long the employee spent in his place. To obtain information, heat and human motion sensors are used.

According to Barclays spokesman Tom Hoskin, the appliances were installed in stages, and Unite employees and the union were notified of the change. However, the bankers themselves claim that they did not receive any information about the introduction of tracking sensors.

In an official statement, representatives of Barclays said that the goal of OccupEye is not to track people, but to evaluate the effectiveness of the use of office space. At the London offices of other major banks - JPMorgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Citigroup Inc. and Credit Suisse Group AG - such tracking devices are not used. This was reported by Bloomberg sources on condition of anonymity.

OccupEye device | Image: Lancashire Telegraph

Barclays bankers were not the first to be monitored by company leaders with OccupEye - in 2016, such devices were installedin the editorial office of the Daily Telegraph. The purpose of the implementation was to monitor the quality and time of work of journalists. After the information about installing the tracking sensors got on the Internet, a big scandal erupted, and under the pressure of critics, the management of the publication decided to abandon the installation of the OccupEye system.