All work computers will be monitored. The idea of personal privacy on a work-provided machine will be gone. Currently, scanning of eMail is allowed and practiced. And currently the trend in Corporatia is the house workers in "bullpens" -- areas with all the computers facing outward from a central mega-cube. Thus all workers and anyone walking through the space may see everyone's desktop at all times, and the worker's back is to everyone else, so the worker can't really tell who is watching. Also, corporate firewalls are getting more restrictive in what sites they allow. At one employer, I was not allowed to visit any site that is a discussion forum, or any site that is webmail. These policies will be extended to monitoring the virtual desktop via remote control software and keyloggers, such that at any time throughout the day, someone, maybe your boss, maybe a security person, will be seeing your virtual desktop on his desktop. You won't know when, so you'll behave as though it is omnipresent. From there, video recognition, API level monitoring, and keylogging will be used by datamining applications to recognize patterns of behavior, under the guise of "security," but extending to protections against "insubbordination," "inappropriate use of work resources," "harassment," and eventually chilling any expression (eMail, discussion, chat, blogging) or privacy (surfing, personal files) on computers for the vast majority of workers.
(First published in 2007 here: http://wiki.thinkprank.com/wiki/Laramie/Future )
I wrote this post in 2007. In 2010, one prospective hiring manager bragged that he liked Google Docs because he could watch his whole team typing remotely.
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