TCS has rejected reports that it is using software to monitor individual employee activity on company-issued laptops. The clarification followed a Moneycontrol report claiming that the IT services company had installed a Digital User Experience Monitoring tool on employees’ devices.
The report has sparked a wider debate about how companies can maintain cybersecurity while protecting employee privacy. Here are five key points about the issue.
1. What did the report claim?
According to the report, TCS had introduced a Digital User Experience Monitoring tool on laptops provided to employees. Sources cited by the publication claimed that the software could reveal which applications employees were using and how much time they spent on them.
Such tools are typically used by organisations to monitor the performance of devices and systems. However, the reported capabilities raised concerns about whether the technology could also be used to monitor individual workers.
2. What is TCS’s response?
TCS has firmly denied that it monitors employees individually.
“The reports regarding surveillance of employees are baseless and inaccurate. TCS does not track individual employee activity on laptops and respects their privacy. We use tools to monitor macro-level network performance, to ensure security, availability and enhanced user experience for our employees,” the company told India Today Tech.
The company maintains that its monitoring systems are intended to assess overall network performance rather than track individual employees’ activities on their laptops.
3. Why do companies use such tools?
Digital monitoring systems can serve legitimate operational and cybersecurity purposes. Organisations may use them to detect unusual network behaviour, resolve technical issues, improve device performance and protect corporate systems against security threats.
Concerns arise when monitoring moves beyond system-level information and begins collecting detailed data about an individual employee’s work habits. TCS says its tools are restricted to monitoring network performance at a broader level.
4. Employee monitoring is not new
TCS is not the only technology company to face scrutiny over workplace monitoring. Similar debates have taken place across the global technology sector.
Meta, for example, faced criticism after introducing a system capable of collecting information about employee keystrokes and mouse activity as part of an AI-related initiative. The company later introduced options that allowed employees to temporarily pause data collection and seek exemptions.
Employee surveillance has also come under legal scrutiny in several countries, where regulations governing workplace monitoring differ considerably.
5. What remains unclear?
The key unresolved issue concerns the technical capabilities of the tools used by TCS and how any information collected through them is processed.
While the Moneycontrol report referred to application-level visibility, TCS maintains that it does not track individual employee activity. The difference between the reported capabilities and the company’s description of how the tools are used remains central to the debate over employee privacy.
