It is allowed, contrary to eg the EU, where this is not allowed.
Most companies large enough to have their own IT have monitoring and know what's going through their network. The larger the company, the more likely they're watching. I've personally never seen that information used against anybody unless they were looking at shady stuff (porn, hacking websites, etc.), but I'm sure they're monitoring.
Even outsourced IT for small companies will often put "security" software like Sentinel One or Sophos on machines they manage, and those can track and block web traffic, report everything being installed, and even MITM HTTPS traffic.
Personally I don't see the big deal. If I don't want my employer watching something, I don't do it on their network. I monitor what's going on in my tiny home network, and I expect anybody administrating larger networks does the same thing.
Additionally, don't use personal devices for work, but that is because of other reasons.
Perhaps it's the lack of proper authoritarian regime in the US' past that drives this. I believe the temporal proximity of such makes people aware of, and angry against, the many traps that such systems leave in their "law", so you can be imprisoned anytime for anything. EU has a bunch of countries with varying degree of such past.
Its allows in most of the EU apart from germany where there are strict limits.
however you can still record what your users are doing for purposes of detecting fraud. This is where it differs from the USA, where they can do anything because they have no data protection laws.
https://www.fachanwalt.de/magazin/arbeitsrecht/internetnutzu...
An employer am allowed to record all your actions for the purposes of detecting fraud and or illegal activity. The method or recording and the way the employer stores and allows access to that recording must be "reasonable"
For example if you are using slack, gchat or teams, all your conversations are logged in the compliance system. Every action you make in m365 is also logged. AWS actions are also logged if you have cloud trail enabled
All you emails are also recorded and stored for n years.
If you have zscaler or some other threat detection system every site that you visit will be recorded. The anti phishing plugin you have will also log what sites you are looking at. Theses are not automatically illegal, its how the data is stored and processed that determines the illegality.
Now, lets get to meta. As part of their leaking detection system, in about 2024 they started routinely taking screenshots of all users every n minutes. One could argue that it wasn't proportionate. However for holland, france and germany, the workers councils should have been informed.
The thing that was illegal was the covert nature, or at least not explicitly telling employees that they were taking screenshots. not the screenshots themselves.
For the AAI bullshit that meta are pushing, again depending on how its done its not necessarily against the various EU/UK data protection laws to record the data. Where it gets interesting is how and where the data is processed later on.
To blindly say that "EU says it can't happen" is far too simplistic and not accurate to say the least.
