I'm not sure if this is the best place to post this, but there are way too many legal subs to choose from, and I've seen some good workplace-related legal discussions happen here, so…..
I've been a supervisor for a work-from-home call center for about 15 years. For the last 10-12 years we've used our own chat client (similar to Skype) that was developed by our in-house team. Like any other chat software, there is an indicator that shows if a user is currently active or away, and everyone that uses it is well aware of that feature. What we DON'T tell the employees (and I actually just recently found out myself) is that on the back end, we also keep a log of all of the activity from the chat client in a database that can be crosschecked against their phone login status, so we can easily see if someone was inactive for a long period of time (AKA most likely away from their workstation) when they should have been working on a project in a non-call working status.
I know employers are allowed to install pretty much whatever type of surveillance software they want on their own systems and employees should have no expectation of privacy when using a work system or VPN, however we are required to use our own personal computers and home internet connections for the job, and from my understanding employers are required to disclose if they are installing any type of monitoring or surveillance software on your personal system. Is knowing that our current status is shown online in the chat client enough of a disclosure, or should we also be disclosing to employees that we store that activity data for later reference?