CEO Fired Over Employee Monitoring Among Forrester Privacy Predictions for 2023

A C-level executive will be fired for their firm’s use of employee monitoring in 2023. That’s one of the security, privacy, and risk predictions aired by Forrester on Monday.

In the coming year, lawmakers will be paying increased attention to workplace monitoring, and whistleblowers may also be demanding monitoring information to support complaints about labor law violations, according to the predictions put together by 10 Forrester analysts.

The analysts advised companies to prioritize privacy rights and employee experience when implementing any monitoring technology, whether it is for productivity, return-to-office strategies, or insider risk management.

“People in the C-suite need to be cognizant of what they monitor and people’s privacy, and ideally they’ll have a third-party audit behind them to make sure they’re compliant with applicable regulations,” observed Joey Stanford, head of global security and privacy for Platform.sh, a global platform as a service provider.

“We have a new generation of employees coming in that care about privacy rights,” he told TechNewsWorld.

Timothy Toohey, a privacy attorney with Greenberg Glusker in Los Angeles, agreed that violations of employee or customer privacy could bring an executive down in the future.

“In light of the Drizly decision by the FTC, executives are very much in the crosshairs,” he told TechNewsWorld. “If there’s a case where there’s been inadequate security, no security plan, or a prior breach that’s been ignored, I can see someone from the C-suite being put on the chopping block.”

In the Drizly case, the Federal Trade Commission announced in October that it would impose individual sanctions against the CEO of that alcohol delivery company for data privacy abuses, which allegedly resulted in the exposure of the personal information of about 2.5 million customers.