Freelance Platform Upwork's Opt-in Service Tracks Freelancers By Capturing Screenshots, Webcam Photos and Measuring Clicks and Keystrokes Frequency (buzzfeednews.com)

Caroline O'Donovan, reporting for BuzzFeed News: To convince workers to join the unstable and unreliable world of freelance work, startups and platforms often promise freedom and flexibility. But on the digital freelance platform Upwork, company software tracks hundreds of freelancers while they work by saving screenshots, measuring the frequency of their clicks and keystrokes, and even sometimes taking webcam photos of the workers. Upwork, which hosts "millions" of coding and design gigs, guarantees payment for freelancers, even if the clients who hired them refuse to pay. But in order to get the money, freelancers have to agree in advance to use Upwork's digital Work Diary, which counts keystrokes to measure how "productive" they are and takes screenshots of their computer screens to determine whether they're actually doing the work they say they're doing.

Upwork's tracker isn't automatically turned on for all gigs on the platform. Some freelancers like it because it guarantees payment, but others find it unnerving. [...] Upwork maintains that freelancers don't have to use the time tracker if it makes them uncomfortable. [...] But while Work Diary may be opt-in on its surface, Microsoft Research's Mary Gray said freelancers may not feel like they really have a choice.

Comments

Counting Keystrokes

[Oswald McWeany]

Counting keystrokes is a silly idea!!!!!!!!!! Really it is !!!!!!!!! That could never be abused!!!!!!!! No way to pad that!!!!!!!!

I pity the reviewers

[OzPeter]

Working from home is great. And sometimes I even put clothes on!

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

This is how some people think

[Rick Schumann]

This is how paper shufflers, bean counters, and other non-producing types think. That's why all they're good for it shuffling papers around, obsessively counting things, and the only things they produce are more papers for other paper-shufflers to shuffle around, and more things for bean counters to count.

Got to pound the non-round pegs into the same round holes everyone else fits into, or you're not a 'productive worker'!

People do not like having anyone looking over their shoulder all the time, whether literally or 'virtually'.
You want people to be productive? Let them know what you need done, then get out of the way and let them do it. If they consistently don't get it done, then you can replace them with someone else, but micromanaging people is just plain stupid and that's what all this surveillance of 'freelance workers' is.

Re:Never go full psychopath!

[sjames]

No gun, but you can bet they're hoping to soak up the potential alternatives until it's the tracker or "want fries with that?"

If schemes such as these go away, the need for work to be done won't go away, it's just that the people doing the work will be offered less creepy conditions to work under.

Re:They’re not the only ones

[Hognoxious]

Surely the proof that you did the work would be ... the work?

I don't need to take screenshots of a bricklayer at intervals of a minute; either the wall's there (and it's up to standard - straight and level and awesome and all that) or it isn't.