FUTURE OF WORK
New Jersey Lawsuit Says Remote Worker Was Fired for Refusing Webcam Photos Every Three Minutes
A lawsuit in New Jersey claims a longtime remote employee was fired after she refused a monitoring tool that would photograph her through her webcam about 160 times a day.
Image: IntraGoals Media
A New Jersey lawsuit claims a remote employee lost her job after she refused to let her employer photograph her through her webcam every few minutes.
The plaintiff is Glennis Von Sander-Timinski. She worked for Sutherland Healthcare Solutions, a company that provides outsourced health care services. According to the suit, she had worked from home since 2018 with no issues and had received positive performance reviews.
The suit says things changed in August. Her company told her it would start using a new tool called Sentinel AI. The software would take a photo of her through her webcam about every three minutes during the workday. That adds up to roughly 160 photos a day.
The lawsuit alleges she was fired after she refused to agree to this monitoring. The source material does not give more detail on the timeline, the company's response, or what the court has done so far.
The case lands in a wider debate about workplace surveillance. The Inc. report says employer monitoring is becoming more common, even though many employees dislike it. It cites the American Psychological Association, which says monitoring raises workers' stress and lowers their reported mental health.
It also points to a Canadian study. That study found workplace surveillance leaves employees feeling more pressured, less satisfied with their jobs, and as if their privacy is being violated.
Those findings are about more traditional tools, such as keyboard tracking and email monitoring. The Inc. report asks what the effect might be when AI is used to photograph an employee's face 160 times a day. That question is still open, and the report does not answer it.