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Myrna Coronado-Brookover, senior vice president of asset services at Transwestern, a commercial real estate company that helped oversee the app’s rollout, said the app is “an important piece of technology that helps people feel safe going back to the office.” in the building.
Building applications also offer the ability to monitor the use of conference rooms, cafeterias and parking lots to improve operations. This data collection A bigger move towards “proptech” a real estate approach that allows companies to keep track of how many people are in different parts of a building and can help save on heating, cooling and lighting in unused spaces.
However, privacy advocates say they are concerned about employee personal data being collected.
Companies have been monitoring employee phone and computer use for years, but these apps “take employee surveillance to a new level,” said Lorrie Faith Cranor, professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University and director of the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Lab.
Apps can cause stress for employees at work who feel their movements are being tracked, particularly if the system flags personal information such as non-working employees spending extended periods in each other’s offices or time someone is using it, he said. the toilet often.
Dr. Cranor said companies need to be transparent about what information they monitor, how they use it, who can access it and why. With the idea that the more personal the information the more restricted access should be, he said, privacy practices should differ based on the types of data collected.
To help alleviate privacy concerns, companies using building applications should anonymize data whenever possible, said Paul Rohmeyer, a professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology. Identifying individuals can be important, for example, while in contact or investigating a crime committed on the property, he said, but the system default should not be to identify every employee all the time.
Dr. Rohmeyer said monitoring software in app development should be limited for other reasons as well. Corporate espionage hackers can, for example, identify business processes or what kinds of deals are in business by monitoring who gets together, or monitor the routines of senior leaders.
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