TCS Employee Laptop Monitoring Stirs Data Security, Privacy Concerns

Tata Consultancy Services has installed a Digital User Experience Monitoring tool on laptops issued to its employees, according to a Moneycontrol report. The move has reportedly sparked questions over whether the technology is meant to safeguard company data or to track staff activity.

The tool allows 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 is 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, employee-monitoring software is not new to India's IT and business process management sector. However, the absence of any formal communication from TCS about this rollout, something typically expected when such tools are introduced, has fuelled speculation among staff. The timing also coincides with growing pressure on Indian IT firms to strengthen protection of client data.

Questions remain over how far the monitoring extends, particularly if data on individual application usage or working hours is being collected at the level of specific employees. 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.

According to the report, 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 Similar Case At Cognizant

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.

Cognizant 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.

The latest development also follows TCS's expanded partnership with cybersecurity firm Zscaler months earlier, under which it launched TCS Workspace Experience Studio, built using Zscaler Digital Experience.

TCS had described the offering as combining zero-trust security, workplace observability, digital experience monitoring and AI-driven experience analytics for enterprise clients. Whether the monitoring tool now deployed on employee laptops is powered by the same Zscaler technology could not be established. TCS's earlier announcement had positioned Workspace Experience Studio as a product for enterprise customers, while the current development concerns its own employees' devices.