Can Workers Meaningfully Consent to Workplace Wellbeing Technologies?

Passive sensing technologies are being deployed in the workplace to unobtrusively collect detailed data about workers’ activities and group interactions to intuit and support their wellbeing. However, given the inherent and structural power dynamics in the workplace, the prevalent approach of accepting tacit consent for these technologies raises privacy and ethical concerns. This paper unpacks challenges workers face when consenting to workplace wellbeing sensing technologies. Using a hypothetical case to prompt reflection among six multi-stakeholder focus groups involving 15 participants, we explored participants’ expectations and capacity to consent to these technologies. We sketched possible interventions that could better support meaningful consent by drawing on critical computing and feminist scholarship – which reframes consent from a purely individual choice to a structural condition experienced at the individual level that needs to be freely-given, reversible, informed, enthusiastic, and specific (FRIES). The focus groups revealed that socio-technical interventions to the technology’s aims and affordances and the policies and practices surrounding the technology are necessary to make the technology truly consentful.

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