Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s largest IT services company, has denied reports that it is using monitoring tools to track individual employee activity on company-issued laptops. The clarification comes amid growing scrutiny over workplace surveillance technology and how companies balance cybersecurity and productivity with employee privacy.
TCS said the reports were “baseless and inaccurate,” stressing that it does not track individual employee activity on laptops. According to the company, the tools in question are designed to monitor the overall performance of its network and improve security, availability and the digital experience of employees.
Credits: India Today
What TCS Is Accused Of Monitoring
The controversy follows reports that TCS had deployed a Digital User Experience Monitoring tool across company-issued laptops. Such tools can provide information about application usage, including which applications are accessed and how much time is spent on them.
While this type of technology can have legitimate IT purposes, the issue lies in how the information is collected and used. If data is aggregated, it can help companies identify network problems, troubleshoot software and improve infrastructure. If it is linked to individual employees, however, it can potentially become a tool for monitoring workplace behaviour or productivity.
TCS has insisted that its implementation falls into the former category. The company said its tools operate at a macro level and are not intended to track individual employee activity.
The distinction is particularly important for TCS because of the sheer size of its workforce. With nearly 600,000 employees, any monitoring technology deployed across company-issued devices could potentially operate at an enormous scale.
Why Employee Surveillance Is Becoming a Bigger Issue
Digital monitoring tools have become increasingly common across the IT and business-process management industries. Companies use them for cybersecurity, device management, troubleshooting and understanding the performance of digital workplace infrastructure.
However, the same technologies can also provide detailed insights into how employees use their devices. This has created a growing debate around workplace privacy, particularly as hybrid and remote working have made digital activity a larger part of everyday work.
The central question is therefore not simply whether companies use monitoring software, but what information they collect, whether it can be tied to specific employees and how that information is ultimately used.
Cognizant’s ProHance Controversy
TCS’s clarification also brings back memories of a similar controversy involving Cognizant and workforce-management platform ProHance.
Cognizant had faced scrutiny over the use of the platform, which can provide information such as login times, application and website usage and periods of inactivity. The company, however, denied that the system was being used to evaluate individual employee performance.
Cognizant said productivity-measurement tools were deployed only for select client projects, primarily to understand process steps and identify inefficiencies.
The controversy highlighted the growing sensitivity around employee-monitoring technologies in India’s technology industry, where companies employ millions of people and increasingly rely on digital tools to manage distributed workforces.
Credits: Outlook Business
TCS-Zscaler Partnership
The latest development also comes months after TCS expanded its partnership with cybersecurity company Zscaler and launched TCS Workspace Experience Studio, powered by Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX).
TCS describes Workspace Experience Studio as an enterprise solution combining zero-trust security, workplace observability, digital experience monitoring and AI-powered experience analytics. The objective is to help businesses understand and improve the performance of their digital workplaces.
Such platforms are designed to give IT teams visibility into the digital experience across an organisation. But as the TCS controversy demonstrates, the boundary between monitoring technology and employee surveillance can quickly become a sensitive issue.
For now, TCS maintains that its systems are focused on network-level performance rather than individual employees. The bigger debate, however, is likely to continue as companies deploy increasingly sophisticated tools capable of seeing more of what happens on workplace devices.
