Bosses known to spy over employees with work-based fitness trackers

Workplace fitness is being promoted more than ever. With bosses and business owners realizing the potential fit candidates hold when it comes to handling a project has led to an increase in the use of fitness trackers being provided by employers to the employees.

Now, if at your workplace, you have been provided with any fitness tracker, chances are your boss might sift through your fitness data acquired by the tracker. This means that employers hold the potential to keep track of your movements along with other information such as lifestyle as well as personal ailments related to fitness such as heart diseases. There are chances that your boss might keep track of how you take care of your fitness requirements during the weekends, if you happen to wear the same as you party with friends, mentioned The Washington Post.

Often, the employers issue fitness based trackers in order to encourage the employees to invest in a rather physically-active and healthy lifestyle. A man interviewed by popular magazine named The Post mentioned that he received a congratulatory call by his boss who supervised him for 25 years as he increased his overall step count. This evidently pointed out to the fact that his fitness rhythm was being monitored this whole time. Employees might even receive cash incentives, reduced premiums for medical insurance or other pluses when agreeing to wear these devices while showcasing successful achievements in terms of fitness.

The senior VP at Fitbit Health Solutions, Adam Pellegrini mentioned that the employers here are looking for a sudden behavioral change among the employees. Through the use of this system, bosses can actually track the individuals who focus on their overall health goals and make a stringent action plan.

In exchange for these incentives, the employees might be trading out more access for personal data to their employers without even realizing the same. Now, given that the fitness trackers tend to be notoriously inaccurate, your employers might just be evaluating your performance based on a series of false information.

Senior Staff Attorney, Lee Tien, for the Electronic Frontier Foundation mentioned that this gives a chance to the employers to get access to the employees’ lives outside the office or off-duty hours. Now, this might severely impact whether one gets retained in their position, demoted, or even promoted to better ranks as they follow better fitness protocol which is vigorously being monitored by their bosses.