‘I'm disgusted. Is this even legal??’: Australian woman discovers her manager has been secretly screenshotting and saving cropped images of her face during video calls for six months

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  via fizkes

  Man having a video call with a woman on a laptop.

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• Video calls come with a reasonable social contract. You show up, you participate, you occasionally look away to take a note, and when it's over, everyone moves on with their day. Nobody signs up for the part where their manager is quietly cropping screenshots of their face and saving them to a folder for six months.

• Does my manager have the right to secretly take screenshots of my face during video calls?

  
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  via Maxime

  Man attending a group video call on a laptop at a desk.

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• The folder name alone is doing a lot of work here. Calling it something like Meeting Snaps suggests enough comfort with the activity to give it an organized home on a shared drive, which is a level of confidence in the behavior that the behavior probably doesn't warrant. Accidentally discoverable is not the same as above board.

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  via Infinite_Night6485

• The six-month timeline is what takes this from uncomfortable to genuinely unsettling. A recent disagreement might explain a short burst of documentation, the kind of defensive record-keeping that happens when a workplace conflict is fresh. But six months of cropped face screenshots predating any conflict isn't documentation, it's a collection. Those are different things and they point in different directions.

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  via Infinite_Night6485

• Being the only person in the folder is the detail that matters most. Daily standups involve multiple people. Multiple people are presumably visible on screen at any given moment. Selecting one face repeatedly, cropping everything else out, and saving it over an extended period is a very specific set of choices that someone made consistently and deliberately. The most charitable interpretation available still requires explaining why that particular collection exists at all.

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• Australian privacy law, from what the story and comment section tell us, takes a reasonably serious view of workplace surveillance, and the general principle that employees have some expectation of dignity even during work hours is not a radical legal position. Whether a specific law was broken depends on details that a lawyer or the relevant workplace authority would need to assess, but the question of whether this is normal or acceptable has a pretty clear answer without any legal analysis at all.

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  via linkedinsalesnavigator

  Man having a video call on a laptop at a desk with plants.

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  via Infinite_Night6485
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• Reporting it to HR with the folder as evidence is the obvious next step. The folder existing on a shared drive is both the problem and the documentation of the problem, which is a rare situation where the thing that needs to be reported comes with its own proof already organized and labeled.

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