The performance review¶

Research brief, The Morporkian Civil Liberties Union (MCLU). Open file.

Every measurement taken is unremarkable. Time at the desk. The calendar. How long a message sits before it is answered. Which meetings were attended. The badge on the door. Which documents were opened and for how long.

Not one of those is worth objecting to on its own, and the worker would struggle to say which one they object to now.

Together they are a portrait, and the portrait is what the review is about. The employee is shown the record and asked whether any of it is wrong. None of it is wrong. Every figure is accurate.

The conclusion drawn from the figures is the thing they would contest, and it is not clear that the conclusion belongs to anybody.

• When every individual measurement is accurate, what exactly is there to appeal against?

• Whose conclusion is it, when the measurements were taken by one system, combined by another, and read out by a manager who did neither?

What lawful measurement costs¶

• The ILO on intrusive surveillance and loss of autonomy at work, April 2026, and the working paper behind it.

• Barbulescu v Romania for the proportionality factors, including prior notice of the nature and extent of monitoring.

• The Article 29 Working Party’s opinion on data processing at work, and why it steers employers away from consent.

• The CNIL decision on Amazon France Logistique: fully disclosed measurement, still held excessive, and which indicators were struck down.

• Whether any authority has addressed aggregation specifically, as against each measure taken alone.

Last updated: 17 September 2026