'A huge whopping file 2.5 inches thick of my personal ChatGPT account, Gemini Account, and conversations with co-workers': Boss reveals they've been recording employee's full personal history, uses it against them

Author image for JR Atkinson
JR Atkinson • Writer and Editor
Jun 6, 2026 10:00 AM EDT

Should you assume that everything you do at work is being recorded?

The worker in this story, who shared on the antiwork subreddit, didn't know the extent of it. They assumed that they were being monitored to some degree. We all have to assume this when we're at work. It's sort of a natural thing to expect, to a degree. You're giving your time to them, so they get to have control over it. But do they get to know every last thing you're doing with your company time? Depends on who you ask. As a rule, you should probably expect that your boss knows what you're doing when you're at work. Even if you're uncomfortable with that, you should probably be careful about what you do and what you say during work hours, using work technology. The person in this story learned that the hard way. 

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    Thing Contact
    via Unsplash+ (Getty Images)

    An employee puts his head in his hands at his desk at work

  • 02

    Asked for my personnel file, got a 2.5-inch-thick binder of double-sided printouts of my screen logs.

    Let go from my job because of "restructuring" without any performance complaints, and you should always ask for your personnel record, so I did.
    via LunarGiantNeil
  • 03
    I got three copies of the employee handbook, my job application paperwork, emails from the one time I got chewed out for not being in office when nobody else was and I didn't realize I needed to be there to sign for a package (it wasn't discussed or asked of me) and a huge whopping file 2.5 inches thick of my personal ChatGPT account, Gemini Account, and conversations with co-workers on teams.
    via LunarGiantNeil
  • 04
    Utterly shocked. I was never doing anything unprofessional, except about my bosses when they made my life miserable with their micromanaging, but this is a truly insane revelation. I thought I was being paranoid.
    via LunarGiantNeil
  • 05
    We use Al in the workplace so that's not a breach, and I didn't have an expectation of privacy, but this isn't an IT log of inputs, it's screenshots, some with circles or boxes added to highlight sections. Horror! I thought it was bulls to make me do clerical work and pull me off my main accounts! Shame! I wanted to position myself for a promotion!
    via LunarGiantNeil
  • 06
    How much time were my bosses wasting watching me do MY job instead of theirs? I had recently talked to an employment attorney when I left because the severance they offered required me to do so. He
    via LunarGiantNeil
  • 07
    said I might have been misclassified for most of my last year there, as my duties and responsibilities did not demonstrate much discretion, independence, or respect for my judgment. Apparently, he might have a point!
    via LunarGiantNeil

  • Nobody likes feeling like their privacy has been invaded. We all want to feel like we can do what we need to do without being observed. If you want to talk a little smack about your boss, you want to be able to do that. But should you use company channels to do so? Probably not. That didn't stop this worker, who was surprised to find that their boss had been tracking… everything. What would you do if you were suddenly confronted with all the things you've ever said or done or typed while you were on the clock? You might hold your breath, waiting to see just how it all went wrong. It's a weird feeling to realize that you've been watched the entire time. Even if you have some vague idea that you're being observed, it's a different thing to be confronted by it all at once. It can shake you to your core. You start racking your brain for all the things that you could have said that might possibly get you in trouble. Keep reading to see what happened here and see if you agree about how it proceeded.

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    Commenters had some words of advice.

    YeetuceFeetuce If it's a company resouce, everything is logged for at least a month. I'm not using everything improperly here, I literally mean everything.
    via YeetuceFeetuce
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    Cheezburger Image 10636439808
    via Sebastian Herrmann

    An employee is shown something on a phone by his boss at work

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    Now you might think, what if I use my personal phone and the company WiFi? Depends on the router and firewall, but the sites you visit are logged too, down to the last youtube video. Simply put, if you want privacy, don't use company resources.
    via YeetuceFeetuce
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    Glum_Possibility_367 >How much time were my bosses wasting watching me do MY job instead of >theirs? At some places, this IS their job. Coaching vs. actually playing.
    via Glum_Possibility_367
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    Zahrad70 They probably spent no time actively watching you. Most likely, they had an app for that. They may have read the screenshots themselves. It's more likely they were given a summary, leafed through it, and decided you were a problem.
    via Zahrad70
  • 13
    Read that agreement you click through in the morning, folks! "No expectation of privacy" is almost certainly something you agree to every day, and it means exactly this.
    via Zahrad70
  • 14
    ragnarockyroad Generally I'm gonna be on the side of the worker 99% of the time. But what you did was unequivocally stupid. Never leave a paper trail of your dissatisfaction with management unless you want them to see it. Also, GenAl slop is horrible for the environment.
    via ragnarockyroad
  • 15
    ambiguouslyincognito IT has access to anything tied to their network. Your bosses are absolutely reading your messages, emails, and watching internet usage. Most even have key words or phrases that will trigger a review. They can duplicate your desktop and you'll never know.
    via ambiguouslyincognito
  • 16
    RhodyChief Were you complaining about your bosses in Teams chats? If so, that was an incredibly unintelligent thing to do and probably made letting you go very easy. I really hope you weren't.
    via RhodyChief
  • 17
    OkPlenty4077 I know this and don't really care. I got fired George Jetson style but it wasn't because of internet usage. After 3+ years of getting bu ed around by management, I was going to
    via OkPlenty4077
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    be terminated eventually. I wasn't planning on quitting. I was going to make them fire me. Took awhile to finally happen. If corporate's main objective is to crop on their employees like that they have every right to do that, but I guess they aren't
    via OkPlenty4077
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    interested to getting work done. This is the mantra in the US, so they can deal with the labor problem themselves.
    via OkPlenty4077
  • 20
    UnluckyAssist9416 They probably don't look at any of it. Collecting massive amounts of data is easy, nobody has the time to actually look at the data. Managers go from 1 meeting to the next. They might now be using Al to summarize some parts of it, but Al reading data is expensive, so unlikely.
    via UnluckyAssist9416

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boss antiwork workplace-stories toxic-workplace job work coworkers working workplace reddit thread bad bosses Reddit
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