Speaker 1: And welcome back, everybody. Look at that person there. They're still working from home. And do you realize that there is a chance Big Brother is watching, as in Big Boss Brother. Blade Technology's Scott Schaefer joins us with ways workers are monitored. Even Scott is monitored. I couldn't believe that.

Speaker 2: Absolutely, I'm monitored.

Speaker 1: The most trustworthy guy. I mean, why do they do it, the bosses?

Speaker 2: Well, there's many different reasons. Number one, we do have some bosses that are a little skittish about, are my employees really working at home? What's going on there? And so on and so forth. So we've had people install remote control software where a person can, for example, have 16 different desktops on a monitor and see what everyone's doing. Overkill, in my opinion, because there's so much better information we can get from logs and so on and so forth. For example, when you send a corporate email, that corporate email is going to be grabbed by your corporate email system, and it's going to be there essentially forever. And that's what we're seeing more and more of these types of programs like Microsoft Exchange, Outlook, Gmail, and all this. So even if I delete it, they can still save it. That's right, because we have these things called litigation holds, for example, that if you think you may be coming under litigation of some sort, you can click a couple of boxes on your mailbox, my mailbox, for example, and even though we may be deleting things, they're being kept in the background just in case they're needed for legal proceedings going forward.

Speaker 1: So are these items, they'll say, okay, you work with this laptop or you work with this computer, they supply it with you. What if you're using your own at home?

Speaker 2: That's a great question, because if you're using your own gear, the data on it is still the company's. So you could get in a position where you're using your home computer to do work for your business that you work for, and then there's some sort of litigation problem, and then they could literally come get your computer to see what data is on it. Even though you own it, the data is owned by the company. And they can also monitor certain words or phrases. Absolutely, that's a good one, too. That's becoming more and more common, and these type of solutions are really like the low-grade ones. So what we could do is every time the word Pertsborn pops up in one of my emails. Which is like every day. Every day, every minute, actually. It'll fire off an alert to the email administrator, to that person's supervisor, have a way you want to set it up so you know. And we use this a lot if we think that somebody on staff maybe is gathering up contacts from the company to maybe start their own competing business. That's where we can make that connection, and we can let the business owner know this is coming down the pipe.

Speaker 1: And on a closing note, probably the most common is the time you log in or log out.

Speaker 2: Absolutely, we can see when you log in or log out. You have to also remember every file that you touch, everything you basically do is being logged somewhere in the system. And depending on your employer, they may be taking all those logs and aggregating them and could reconstruct your entire computer history for like the last year.

Speaker 1: Well, we need somebody to monitor the bosses, because what I'm hearing out there is that people working from home are actually working harder than they did when they were in the office.

Speaker 2: Yeah, it's true. We've actually seen statistics at our firm where we're seeing more productivity in this kind of a mixed environment, which is great. That is Scott Schaefer from Blade Technologies.

Speaker 1: If you have any questions about this, you can always contact Scott. Thanks so much for coming in. Always a pleasure. We're going to take a break. We'll be back with more Fox 2 News in the morning at 7 right after this.