On Employers Making Inferences About Their Employees Using Biometrics

What happens to employee privacy when employers have the potential to make predictions about their employees using data collected by wearable devices like HMDs?

The Extended Mind conducted a 1,010 person survey of U.S. participants weighted to the 2019 American Community Survey using age, gender, race, household income and census region. The goal was to assess consumer knowledge about current data practices and protections, as well as to gather consumer preferences around data management for VR and AR (XR) data. Very little research has been done on consumer XR preferences, but assuming the widespread adoption of XR is imminent it’s important to understand user preferences in regards to data collection and privacy.

It’s predicted that enterprise VR will be a 4.26 billion dollar industry in 2023 as its growth has been spurred in recent years by the pandemic and the movement towards remote work (Higginbottom, 2020). But this kind of growth usually foregoes considerations for the workers who will be asked to use the technology for work. And questions remain about who would have access to the data collected about them through the devices (device manufacturer, employer, etc.).

XR devices come with inherent privacy concerns because their functionality relies on a wide variety of data streams which will include personal and identifiable information. Given this, we wanted to investigate how people would feel about that data being collected and applied across contexts. In this blog post, we’ll cover how respondents felt about employers making predictive inferences about their employees based on data collected by an XR device.

To get insight into how potential users might think about these scenarios, we asked our survey respondents about their current experiences with employers, technology, and privacy, and asked how they would feel about hypothetical scenarios in which XR data was collected about them and used to make inferences about them.

Are workers currently asked to use products or services that pose a risk to their privacy?

Nine percent (n=91) of our survey respondents reported being in a situation where an employer asked them to use a technological service or product that posed a potential risk to their privacy. Here are a few examples they offered:

“We have a temperature taker at work that matches my face with a stored file and takes my temperature. I could not opt out.”

“I had to download a timekeeping app for my last job that had the capability of tracking me.”

“Downloaded an app for the job but it also access my personal data from my phone.”

These examples show that some employers are already collecting biometric and activity tracking data on their employees. With XR, there is the potential for the scale and scope of this type of workplace surveillance to increase.

How comfortable are workers with employers collecting data via wearables and using it to make inferences about them?

Data collected on individuals can not only be used to report on their location or activity, but to make predictions about them. This happens with online advertisements, which predict what people will buy based on past purchases. With data streams collected via wearable devices, such as augmented reality glasses or virtual reality headsets, pupil dilation eye and gaze tracking could mean making more personal and targeted predictions.

To understand how people would feel about this predictive technology being applied in the workplace, we asked survey respondents their comfort level with employers having access to inferences made about them from wearable device data.

For most examples, the majority of respondents were uncomfortable with their wearable data being used to make predictions about them. Although we can’t say for sure why the discomfort levels are between 59% and 64%, we speculate that the power dynamics between employee and employer are at play, as are the powerlessness that users might feel to influence what is predicted about them based on their data.

Takeaways

Over the next decade, wearable technology will make its way into the workplace. But what ethical usage of these devices look like has yet to be addressed. Some key questions include:

• How will these devices be used? (Video conferencing, employee tracking, interviewing remote candidates, etc.)
• Who will have access to the data from the devices? (Device manufacturer, employer, others?)
• How will wearable devices change workplace power dynamics?
• Will wearable devices have a disproportionate impact on certain employee subgroups?

Before VR and AR devices become standard in the workplace, more research needs to be done on what ethical integration looks like and how the devices can be used while still preserving the autonomy of employees.

To learn more about this research visit www.extendedmind.io/survey