In the U.S. and many other countries, schools and employers have the legal right to monitor people, and they don’t always have to disclose what is being tracked.

For years, China has deployed cameras and other technology in classrooms to monitor students’ attentiveness.

In New York, the Lockport City School District began piloting its Aegis facial and object recognition system built by Canadian company SN Technologies.

Meanwhile, Microsoft mines chat, email, calendar and meeting data to measure worker productivity within Microsoft itself. Sales team members were given personalized dashboards visualizing how they spend their time, and the system made recommendations for how to optimize their workflows.

Bunch.ai monitors Slack channels to help managers understand their team dynamics and chemistry. Teramind offers monitoring software that captures real-time keystrokes, records video of their activity and will send an alert to managers if an employee attempts to print a sensitive document. Humanyze uses Bluetooth-enabled badges to track a worker throughout the day and then correlates that information with other data points drawn from email in order to find opportunities for collaboration within teams.