TCS Denies Employee Surveillance Claims, Says It 'Respects Staff Privacy'

Tata Consultancy Services has denied reports regarding surveillance of its employees. The reports claimed that the company has installed a Digital User Experience Monitoring tool on laptops issued to its employees. TCS said it respects the privacy of its employees.

"The reports regarding surveillance of employees are baseless and inaccurate. TCS does not track individual employee activity on laptops and respects their privacy," the firm said.

"We use tools to monitor macro-level network performance, to ensure security, availability, and enhanced user experience for our employees," it added.

The statement comes a day after Moneycontrol reported that TCS installed the tool and that the move reportedly sparked questions over whether the technology is meant to safeguard company data or to track staff activity.

The tool, as reported by the publication, allowed TCS to see details such as which applications employees access and how much time they spend on them, the report said. Within the company, the deployment was also being seen in two ways: as a step to prevent data leaks and as a way to gain tighter control over what happens on employee devices.

Notably, the report had mentioned that the exact scope of the tool and whether the collected information is tied to individual staff members, pooled together for security teams, or made visible to managers, remains unclear.

Moneycontrol had further reported that TCS may need to examine not just login hours but the actual work being carried out during that time, especially since a large share of employees operate through client virtual desktop infrastructure. Monitoring activity on these client-owned systems could raise separate concerns around confidentiality and the risk of data breaches. Managing and analysing this scale of activity data across a workforce of nearly 600,000 employees could also present a considerable operational challenge.

A comparable situation arose last year involving Cognizant, which faced scrutiny over its use of ProHance, a workforce-management tool that logs login times, application and website usage, and periods of inactivity on company laptops.

Like TCS, Cognizant had also denied using the tool to evaluate individual employee performance, saying it was deployed only on specific projects at client request, mainly to study process steps and identify inefficiencies.