OccupEye is a commercial workplace surveillance device that can be installed beneath individual desks to monitor the presence of workers at their workstations. If you have one of these on your desk and happen to be suffering from urinary incontinence, your boss will know it without you telling him/her. The device is not more than a small black box with sensors that can detect heat and movement (or the absence of it).
The existence of such devices has reached the headlines recently when the Daily Telegraph installed (and later removed) the little black boxes on their employees’ desks. The National Union of Journalists openly criticised Daily Telegraph for monitoring its journalists. Sam Kitchener from the Guardian questioned whether this is a “sinister exercise in Big Brother-style management or a 21st-century way to monitor workers’ needs?”
Thus, I decided to tell Jeremy about this too…