What if there was a better way to talk to all your friends than through a thousand different messaging apps on a thousand different platforms?

What if you could just find the show you wanted without browsing through infinite tiles in a hundred different streaming apps?

What if you could have all of your stuff everywhere without dealing with some crummy user interface on some unknowable file sharing platform?

This month on the Vergecast we're looking into connectivity. How we talk to each other, how we talk to our stuff, how we find things online.

All this month, on the Vergecast, available wherever you get podcasts.

The way we work is changing. So for the next couple of Fridays, we're going to talk about where it might be headed.

We're kicking things off today by talking about surveillance.

It used to be hard to play Candy Crush in the office knowing your boss could just look over your shoulder and catch you.

Then came the pandemic and we all brought our work home, but turns out your bosses have found ways to keep an eye on you still.

Surveillance software is something that companies have been using for years.

It's not necessarily new, but there is an increase in usage there.

Danielle LaBrille writes about technology and its impact on workers for the Washington Post.

Now, there are some really cool or creepy, depending on who you are,

use cases of the software and technological advances that are doing things like facial recognition, where the software will actually be able to tell who's doing the work.

And if it's not you and it doesn't match your face or God forbid you turn away from the screen or a child enters the screen or a dog enters the screen, it kicks you off because it assumes

that that sensitive information could be at risk or it may not be you anymore.

So beyond faces, what kind of information can employers see when they're using the software?

So some of the more traditional software that companies are using are things that are like keyloggers or screen-shotting software, things that can record video to show exactly what you were doing at certain hours.

It can also possibly have access to your camera to your audio.

So they might know not only what's on your screen and what you're surfing on the web or what emails you're checking or what social media you're on,

but also what's happening in your household and who's in the picture and who you're talking to and what conversations you're having in the presence of your work devices.

And what categories of workers does this tech mainly affect? It sounds like it's mostly office workers.

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