Today it is to 'combat data theft', tomorrow it will be like Amazon fufillment centers in the Call Center no time to take a potty break. Let's hope we don't hear about the pee jugs there too.....
That's already two decades back.
I remember back when I started out in the 2000s. I worked at a call center here in Bangalore. The breaks were one 35 mins(lunch), three 15m breaks spread over the shift, which most people took to use rest rooms. Many times you need to call the floor manager, and they turn it down. You need to hold your rest room emergency until they let you go to the toilet for 15 minutes. You got penalised if you over shot the 15m rest room break.
They even had metrics like resolve rate, calls per day, escalation count, data collection metrics(if you made 3 mistakes entering the user email, you were fired) etc etc.
There’s an entire suite of software companies that have been building this stuff for twenty years, companies like Verint.
Here’s a recent report on one of the companies that counts Apple as its customer monitoring employees by video. [1] Apple in this instance responded that it prohibits such monitoring.
[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/08/09/workers-complain-about-...