Update July 10: After The Daily Beast published this story, Oura updated its initial announcement page about its new Slack integration feature to declare the company had decided to discontinue the new tool. Our story is available to read as originally published below.
The fight for better work-life balance often feels like an arms race: As workers achieve some sort of concessions for flexibility and choice (like remote work), they are also expected to entrench their lives further in the myriad work-related apps and technologies that keep them tethered to their tasks and to their supervisors.
And it seems like tech companies have no shortage of ideas to make this more horrifying and dystopian. Take Slack, for instance—if you thought the app’s incessant dings, cringey gifs, and emoji overload was the worst of it, think again. The Finnish company behind the Oura ring, a wearable device that gathers various health metrics, recently announced that Slack users can share statuses with their coworkers boasting their sleep quality and how well their body has recovered from the previous day.
ADVERTISEMENT
And conversely, that also means giving your bosses a creepy open window into whether you might be sleeping poorly.
Oura claims that the new feature will revive camaraderie between coworkers at a time when many offices remain shuttered or hardly full. “Remote work can be lonely and pose challenges in connecting with teams,” Oura CEO Tom Hale told The Daily Beast. “The goal of an offering like this is increased awareness of teammates’ well-being, more empathetic interactions and stronger collaboration.”
But these intimate scores, according to tech and privacy experts, could simply reveal that your coworker recently celebrated a Margarita Monday, or at worst, force employees to disclose a disability—potentially spurring workplace discrimination and boosting insurance costs.
Slack is not working directly with Oura on its new tool, which is just part of the suite of thousands of third-party apps available on the messaging platform. When reached for comment, a spokesperson for Slack told The Daily Beast the company “offers a variety of settings and controls so that customers can make the right decisions for their security and compliance needs… Slack is a workplace communication tool and we take the privacy and confidentiality of our customers’ data very seriously.”
But that doesn’t guarantee the Oura feature won’t carry risks.
Slack users with Oura rings can opt in to share two scores generated from the data that the device collects 24/7. One is the Sleep Score, which combines information such as heart rate, body temperature, movement and even the time we spend in different sleep phases. Oura’s “proprietary algorithms combine these measurements into a summarized picture of your unique sleep patterns,” according to the company’s website.
The other is the Readiness Score, which gauges how prepared users are to tackle the tasks at hand, incorporating a user’s lowest overnight resting heart rate, body temperature, and physical activity from the past day. It also determines how people are doing compared to recent weeks by incorporating data like heart rate variability and sleep balance—or comparing an individual sleep score to the past 14-day weighted average.
Oura had the idea to collaborate with Slack when a small group of Oura employees began manually adding their Readiness or Sleep scores to their Slack statuses, which Hale said “created empathy and trust.” The company then ran two internal studies and found that 39 percent of Oura employees who participated reported that a coworker reached out with support regarding their Readiness Score. They also found that 70 percent of participants “enjoyed the social aspect” of sharing their Oura scores on Slack.
While displaying these aggregated scores on Slack could theoretically cue to colleagues that you can’t handle a slew of meetings or may need a deadline extension, they break down critical walls separating personal and professional lives. And worse, making this information available to workplaces could also pave the way for serious privacy violations.
Oura’s Slack feature points to a broader trend of workplace monitoring that began in factories and has expanded to office jobs thanks to advancing wearable technologies and algorithms that score worker productivity with this personal data, according to Merve Hickok, senior research director of the Center for AI and Digital Policy and the founder of AIethicist.org. She calls the new integration “pretty dystopian.”
“Those practices, as they become more prevalent, are blurring the lines between private and professional,” Hickok told the Daily Beast.
Centuries of Surveillance
Oura’s new proposal to let your office glimpse your sleep habits is part of a longer history of modern workplace surveillance and biometric data observation. In the 18th century, plantation owners meticulously calculated how to extract maximum profit from enslaved people, setting minimum cotton-picking requirements and even recording how long mothers breastfed their babies.
Corporations carried this tradition into the industrial revolution, with the Ford Motor Company as a prime example: To determine whether workers qualified for the relatively high $5 daily pay rate and set an example as model Americans, Ford sent investigators to employees’ homes to evaluate cleanliness and ordered them to spy on employees’ bank accounts. While the company drastically reduced turnover, even Henry Ford later admitted that “paternalism has no place in industry.”
But his warning went largely unheeded: Today, we’ve seen giant corporations like Amazon and UPS harness technologies like scanners, GPS devices and movement-tracking cameras to keep close tabs on factory employees and delivery drivers—enabling bosses to monitor factory workers’ time spent in the bathroom and film delivery drivers’ every move. With the pressure to ship products as quickly as possible, these companies deem worker downtime as highly inefficient and costly.
Office work was largely spared from the worst surveillance tactics—until the COVID-19 pandemic sparked a remote work revolution, Hickok said.
“Surveillance and productivity monitoring has been going on for a very long time,” Hickok said. “There has been a very significant jump of use of these technologies starting with COVID and the employers wanting to have more robust control over their remote workers.”
Despite Oura’s claims, it’s unclear whether the new Slack feature could actually benefit employees, according to Barbara Plester, a social science researcher who studies organizational behavior at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.
“Potentially it might create some understanding and empathy and collegial support, but the danger is that this kind of personal information might also be used against someone to undermine them,” Plester told The Daily Beast. “It is possible for both positive and negative outcomes to occur simultaneously, depending on who is accessing the information and what they might do with it.”
An Oura spokesperson told The Daily Beast that Slack will only display aggregate scores, not the individual metrics that compose them. These scores aren’t stored in Slack and are cleared at the end of the day. “We believe that personal health data belongs to our members and we will never share data with anyone without express consent from the individual,” the company said.
Still, publicizing this information could harm employees in multiple ways. For one, people may not disclose disabilities to colleagues due to fear of discrimination. But bosses could infer that employees are experiencing medical issues if they consistently display below-average Sleep and Readiness scores, Hickok said. Plus, inaccurate data could suggest someone is feeling unwell even if they’re perfectly healthy.
It’s also possible that Slack and Oura may eventually decide to share this data with insurance companies, potentially boosting people’s yearly costs. Slack told The Daily Beast that it won’t share customer data with government entities or third parties unless they’re legally obliged to. And Oura’s spokesperson said the company will never share its data with “any external parties, including insurance companies.”
But it’s not inconceivable that the companies might one day change their minds, Hickok said. Some insurers are already partnering with businesses to offer employees wearables as part of wellness rewards programs—and the sort of information collected could create “risk scores” based on individuals’ lifestyles that may impact health-care costs. Health data from wearables could also be fed into algorithms that calculate worker productivity, Hickok has found, which can dehumanize employees and prioritize quantity over quality of work.
Oura ring data could also fall into the hands of hackers. While Oura has a relatively solid privacy policy and does a good job of safeguarding this information, according to analysis by the tech nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. But Slack, on the other hand, has experienced multiple data breaches in recent years.
And while Oura explained that people must opt in for the feature and users retain control over their data, Hickok explained that tech surveillance often begins as voluntary with a “soft introduction.”
“We tend to see a similar trajectory and trend with these technologies,” Hickok said. While people are typically assured that they have full control over their data, she explained, they eventually feel pressured to share it until they’re required to disclose it.
In fact, businesses could increasingly rely on health data to hire, promote and even dismiss employees—even unconsciously, according to Hickok, as long as they have access to such information. Ultimately, “this could create a toxic culture of having to become a kind of ‘super worker’ and that health and wellness may become an insidious workplace performance indicator,” Plester said.
As for the claim that the Oura feature will help hybrid and remote colleagues bond, Plester isn’t so sure. She researches ways that employers can accomplish just that, and thinks that activities like quizzes, online happy hours and friendly competitions might offer better solutions.
“Sharing biodata with everyone on Slack opens up the possibility of ridicule, teasing, personal questions… from people that a worker might not know and trust or choose to share with,” Plester said.
Moving forward, it’s possible that lawsuits could help curb this type of workplace surveillance before it pervades corporate culture. Hickok also pointed out that government officials should update labor regulations and work to actually enforce the White House Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights. For now, she noted that it’s crucial to highlight these kinds of data privacy violations before they become widespread.
“You are normalized to be watched and surveilled all the time from a very young age, you are exposed to the same thing at work,” Hickok said. “At some point, you accept that this is the way it is and you don’t have any power. Whereas we do—this shouldn’t be inevitable.”
