Are you dodging work at your current company? Beware, your low productivity might be getting tracked by your employer. But is keylogging legal? While internet logs are checked by many companies worldwide, there is a new trend where bosses might have been installing keyloggers on the office computers. According to reports, a German company decided to install a keylogging software on the PCs at the workplace. After this one of the employees were thrown out because he was found to be playing a computer game but for another company. While this is a wrong practice, but a German court decided to go against it. After the ouster, the employee sued the company saying that the information was collected using illegal methods. Following this, the country’s Federal Labor Court agreed, The Next Web reported. This raises a very pertinent question, whether such extreme levels of surveillance is legal or ethical?

After the incident, the German court reportedly said that keylogging, where every key stroke is stored by the company, is an unlawful way to control the workers. It said that such methods are too much of surveillance, the report added. However, in a report in The Register, it was stated that companies can use the method of keylogging “legally if it was to root out evidence of a criminal or serious offence.” But in this case, it was indeed not ethical. Interestingly TNW report said that the employee had accepted that he was working on a game, but added that it was for his father’s firm and he only worked during his lunch hours.