Meta and Google get data from the app your boss uses to track you

A striking development has emerged in artificial intelligence. Policy PolicyPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. FollowSee All Policy Tech TechPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. FollowSee All Tech Politics PoliticsPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

FollowSee All PoliticsMeta and Google get data from the app your boss uses to track youWorkplace monitoring tools are apparently sharing information even further than workers may realize. Workplace monitoring tools are apparently sharing information even further than workers may realize. by Lauren Feiner Lauren FeinerSenior Policy ReporterPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

Technical Details

FollowSee All by Lauren FeinerMay 21, 2026, 4:03 PM UTC Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Lauren Feiner Lauren FeinerPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. FollowSee All by Lauren Feiner is a senior policy reporter at The Verge, covering the intersection of Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill. She spent 5 years covering tech policy at CNBC, writing about antitrust, privacy, and content moderation reform.

Hundreds of thousands of workplaces use software to monitor employees. Now, a new study has found that many of these tools share data not just with employers, but with digital advertising platforms and data brokers as well. The review was led by Stephanie Nguyen, senior fellow at Columbia Law School’s Center for Law and the Economy and former Federal Trade Commission chief technologist under Lina Khan.

It examined nine workplace monitoring (or “bossware”) services and found that all of them shared some information with third-party platforms. The data ranged from names and email addresses to web history, and recipients included Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. “The striking piece of this study is that every single platform, nine of nine bossware companies, shared worker data with outside companies.

Industry Implications

Every single one,” Nguyen told The Verge in an interview. ”Seven of the nine platforms — Apploye, Desklog, Hubstaff, Monitask, Buddy Punch, VeriClock, and When I Work — did not immediately respond to The Verge’s requests for comment. Ciaran Hale, chief technology officer at another one of the platforms, Deputy, said in a statement that the company’s “third-party relationships are limited to trusted operational and infrastructure providers that support the delivery, security, and reliability of our platform.

” Hale added that Deputy has rigorous privacy controls and that the researchers “appear to have conflated standard B2B marketing cookies found on our public-facing corporate website (such as advertising analytics) with our secure employee application. ” In a statement, Nguyen responded, “We looked at the full experience a worker would have from the moment they visit deputy.

This advance offers important signals about the future of the sector, and the tech world is watching closely.