Personally, I would not agree to being tracked by an employer, unless there was a really good reason, e.g. safety concerns, as it invites abuse of power, even unintentionally.

Stuff like this exacerbates disrespect, distrust and suspicion in employer/employee relationships, in a way I believe no one benefits. Employers tend to use these tools to aggressively police minor infractions, though pretending to only want to catch the few bad apples, driving away the good employees in favour of those who think they can game the system anyway with a tit-for-tat mindset.

In the end trust is eroded, everybody is unhappy, and the underlying issues as to why those bad apples aren't doing their jobs in the first place is never resolved or even investigated.

Philosophically I agree with your stance.

In practice - and particularly in my circumstances - I've found the tracking clause to be palatable, or at least begrudgingly acceptable.

Perhaps my employer is an outlier, but they don't enforce minor infractions at all. So while the manual says we can track you 24/7 the reality is there is no tracking - I literally get calls from my boss asking what country I'm in because half the time they don't know where I am or what I'm doing.

I've seen the actual policy employed twice - in both cases the employee did something deeply unethical. The top dogs take a very dim view on that kind of stuff so the employees found themselves on the wrong end of HR reviewing policy compliance carefully. So be it - I don't need sketchy co-workers.

It's interesting to me that your employer isn't a privacy concern to you.

How much of the data about you in the Equifax breach do you think came from your employer? How much of your data that has been breached came from Wells Fargo--not because you bank there, but because your employer uses them to process direct deposits? And how many times has your employer themselves been breached to give out your name, date of birth, ssn, driver's licence #, passport, address, details about your dependants, etc.?

I'm curious why you assume that the data your employer has about you hasn't already made its way into the hand of "big companies that can make connections between data sets."

>It's interesting to me that your employer isn't a privacy concern to you.

Well a part of it is situation specific - it's a professional service organisation. Everything & everyone is up to their eyeballs in confidentiality agreements so the whole "we'll sell havoc's data for 200 dollars" mindset just isn't a thing.

>I'm curious why you assume that the data your employer has about you hasn't already made its way into the hand of "big companies

They take security very seriously - far more than I do in a personal context. So I don't feel exposed on that front.

So as I said - big brother google is my primary worry here. God knows what they can patch together with their black magic. Supercookies and assorted bullsht. And their eco system is quite difficult to escape (part of the reason I switched to iphone).

But your employer can easily sell that data to big data companies, now or at any point in the future, whether you're still working there or not.

Depends on the type of employer. Mine certainly won't be selling any data to anyone. Their whole business model is trustworthiness & they're not going to wreck their (profitable) business model for a couple of bucks from selling data.

Except if they get acquired, or go public, or go out of business and are liquidating assets, or just change their minds. You don't need to trust them with your data if they don't collect it and they don't need to collect if for you to do your job effectively.