Be aware that if you work anywhere that has to follow any compliance frameworks, using this is a fireable offense because it’ll violate those, as well as any other sensible acceptable use policy at any employer that doesn’t have to follow any compliance requirements.
Examples of what kind of companies have to follow compliance frameworks: your company accepts credit cards, or operates in the finance, banking, health, or insurance industries, or is a government organization or works as a government contractor, or in some cases receives funding from government.
Not an exhaustive list, either. Just buyer beware.
Lol I don’t think users of a product like this are worried about “compliance”
Isn’t screwing off at work itself just as bad?
The biggest issue with this product is if the company care about this type of thing, the item itself won’t be enough to cover for you. Presumably you have projects, metrics, etc., and it will be clear when you aren’t meeting those.
Beyond that, monitoring software does more than check your mouse for movement. When you’re in Outlook for 6 hours a say, mouse-a-jiggling, companies that care will ask why. Not to mention tracking keyboard strokes, mouse clicks, etc.
I’ve seen it all and none of it is worth the money and effort. Just do your job real half-assed and you’ll be fine.
Best motto ever!
Mouse jigglers aren’t just about screwing off and not working. Our company, for example, accepts credit cards which means we have to maintain compliance with the PCI-DSS or else we can lose our ability to accept credit cards from customers if we’re found not compliant during an annual audit. For many companies, that would basically put you out of business, so there’s a lot of pressure to maintain compliance.
We’ve caught our administrators and developers using software mouse jigglers on occasion, but it’s not because they’re screwing around or not working - they’re using these tools to avoid the automatic account locking/logout due to no activity in the last 5-15 minutes timeouts because they get sick of typing in their passwords and having to approve the MFA prompt 30 times a day that ends up being their reality under PCI while they’re multitasking between different systems. A mouse jiggler can keep those sessions artificially active which prevents the automatic locking or logout that’s required for compliant systems for their security, but because these tools are being used to defeat security controls required by the PCI-DSS framework, if our employees are using one, it puts the entire business (not to mention all of our customers who’ve used a credit card with us) at risk of either us going out of business because we can no longer accept credit cards, or our customers’ data and financial information at risk to being stolen by hackers.
People need to understand what the risks are of using a product like this before they find out the hard way, because I’d rather see someone spell it out like an idiot on a shopping forum than to find out when I’m found liable in court for causing a multimillion dollar security breach.
These tools have their place, but a company that’s got compliance frameworks they’re subject to is not one of them. Either don’t use these tools there or go work (or pretend to work, I guess) for someone where that isn’t a risk.