As businesses face more complex regulations and heightened scrutiny by prosecutors, companies are turning to investigative firms to help keep watch over their employees.
The idea behind the "corporate monitoring" business is to nip misconduct in the bud before law enforcement catches a whiff of it. These corporate detectives-for-hire are seeing good business these days, and finding new ways to snoop.
We all know our employers have access to tons of data about us. They can see every person we email from our company email account, every phone number we dial from our desk.
But what if you found out that every bit of that vast ocean of data was being analyzed so that your company could build a portrait of you?
That's what Matt Unger is hired to do. Unger is like the computer-geek-in-chief for K2 Intelligence, an investigative firm in Midtown Manhattan that specializes in corporate monitoring.
Unger is no ordinary gumshoe. He's helping K2 repurpose counterterrorism software developed by the government to catch insider traders.
What Do These Corporate Monitors Do?
Sliding behind a desk and scrolling through screen after screen on his monitor, Unger demonstrated how the software takes snapshots of a person's behavior at a company at any given time.
"We see that this guy Kevin all of a sudden started calling the 410 area code where he never did that before, and he stopped answering emails — he's being less responsive to his peers," Unger said, pointing at a group of statistics clustered under the individual's name. "What has he got cooking on the outside that he's spending so much time on the phone and he's not able to answer his peers?"
Is My Behavior Around The Workplace Suspicious?
There isn't a specific list of behaviors that corporate monitors can say are slam-dunk signs someone is committing misconduct. They won't accuse you just because you took four sick days in a row, or if you phoned your co-worker 10 times in a day. It's more complex than that.
In the case of trying to find insider traders, these monitors aggregate an ocean of data about you — the people you usually message through your company email account, the phone numbers you dial from your desk, the colleagues you instant message at work. And then they look for sudden changes in that behavior.
For example, two people who usually communicate by email suddenly talk only by phone for a few days. And during that time, one of them sells off a bunch of stock from a pharmaceutical company right before the company announces unfavorable information about a drug they're marketing. Monitors might see that as something worth checking out.