This article resonates with me. I feel very strongly about spyware (Bossware is too kind). Views expressed here are my own, not those of my employer.
I work for a company that makes an automated time tracking product (WiseTime [1]). We migrated our infrastructure to EU/Germany because we wanted to fall under a jurisdiction that is one of the strictest when it comes to privacy. This is how we think about the problem.
- Many professionals (lawyers, contractors, ...) get paid for the time that they bill their clients
- Manual time tracking (start/stop stopwatch) sucks
- Automated time tracking is an order of magnitude more convenient
- If you are going to automate the problem away, make sure that the system cannot be abused to spy on people
- Otherwise no one will want to use it!
We view privacy as one of our most important features, and our systems were designed from the ground up to protect it.
- Your activity is captured into a private timeline that only you can see
- To make your time available to your team, you must select the activities that you want to share, and explicitly post them to the team. It's like sending an email. Your draft is private, but once you send it off, then your recipient has a copy of it.
- We allow you to anonymise your posted activity data when you leave a team
- We allow you to specify filters around what activities should and shouldn't be captured. Of course you can delete anything you want off of your private timeline.
- We provide user-level and team-level data retention settings. We automatically purge data that falls outside of your desired retention period.
- We silo our data layer so that we don't store any personal information with user activity data. User activity data is siloed away from posted team data, and so on.
- We take GDPR seriously and we even have automated processes to purge data from our Sales team's CRM
We are a remote-first team, and we wanted to build a system that we personally dogfood without any qualms.
I often find myself thinking about problems in the shower or out on walks, and that's also when I have big breakthroughs. How does WiseTime ensure I'm paid for that time too, not just when my butt is in my seat?
That's a tough one to automate. Right now, it involves logging a manual time entry to your timeline (then posting it). If you walk away from your computer and come back, WiseTime will ask whether you want to log the time (or part of it).
If you wake up in the morning, jump into the shower, solve a problem there, and hop onto your computer, WiseTime will then offer to log the last several hours including your sleep time. Edit down to 10 minutes (or however long your shower was) and log it. A bit contrived, but that's the best I got at this time. It's a tough problem to solve ;)
I work for a company that makes an automated time tracking product (WiseTime [1]). We migrated our infrastructure to EU/Germany because we wanted to fall under a jurisdiction that is one of the strictest when it comes to privacy. This is how we think about the problem.
- Many professionals (lawyers, contractors, ...) get paid for the time that they bill their clients
- Manual time tracking (start/stop stopwatch) sucks
- Automated time tracking is an order of magnitude more convenient
- If you are going to automate the problem away, make sure that the system cannot be abused to spy on people
- Otherwise no one will want to use it!
We view privacy as one of our most important features, and our systems were designed from the ground up to protect it.
- Your activity is captured into a private timeline that only you can see
- To make your time available to your team, you must select the activities that you want to share, and explicitly post them to the team. It's like sending an email. Your draft is private, but once you send it off, then your recipient has a copy of it.
- We allow you to anonymise your posted activity data when you leave a team
- We allow you to specify filters around what activities should and shouldn't be captured. Of course you can delete anything you want off of your private timeline.
- We provide user-level and team-level data retention settings. We automatically purge data that falls outside of your desired retention period.
- We silo our data layer so that we don't store any personal information with user activity data. User activity data is siloed away from posted team data, and so on.
- We take GDPR seriously and we even have automated processes to purge data from our Sales team's CRM
We are a remote-first team, and we wanted to build a system that we personally dogfood without any qualms.
[1]: https://wisetime.com