A company founder reportedly ordered his IT department to monitor the internet history of every employee after becoming convinced that staff were wasting too much time online. The plan was supposed to provide managers with hard data that could be used to assess productivity, particularly among workers in the sales call centre.
Instead, the surveillance system reportedly uncovered something far more awkward. The founder's own browsing history was collected alongside everyone else's, revealing what the IT worker described as 'spectacular' online habits. The biggest twist came when HR allegedly asked for the president to be removed from the reports after his activity became visible.
The Monitoring System Included Everyone
The incident was shared by an anonymous IT worker on Reddit's r/MaliciousCompliance, where the poster described working for an HR company whose founder believed the sales call centre was spending too much time online.
According to the account, management wanted browser history reports covering the entire organisation rather than singling out one department. The reports were intended to be reviewed by managers and HR during weekly performance meetings.
The IT worker therefore created a scheduled task that collected browser history from Windows machines connected to the company's domain. The information was stored centrally and fed into a management portal alongside employee details.
The first results were reportedly less dramatic than management might have expected. Call centre employees had visited familiar sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Amazon, alongside some browsing that was unrelated to work. Overall, however, the poster described their activity as relatively tame.
Then HR began reviewing the reports from senior staff.
The Founder's Browsing History Raised Eyebrows
According to the Reddit post, the browsing history belonging to the company's founder, owner and president was considerably more revealing.
The IT worker claimed the executive had spent a substantial amount of time viewing pornography. The poster said the discovery was not entirely surprising because they had previously worked on the founder's home computer and were already aware of his browsing habits.
What made the situation particularly striking was where that information ended up: inside the same productivity dashboard the founder had demanded to be created for employees.
The account does not identify the company or the executive, and the claims have not been independently verified. They should therefore be treated as an anonymous workplace anecdote rather than established reporting.
Nevertheless, the story's central irony is clear. A monitoring system designed to identify supposedly unproductive workers had also created a record of the person who ordered it.
HR Reportedly Wanted an Exception
The most revealing moment came after HR had seen the reports.
The IT worker says HR asked whether certain individuals could be excluded from the monitoring system. When asked for the names, the poster was reportedly given a list with the president at the top.
That request changed the nature of the story. The issue was no longer simply whether employees should be monitored while using company equipment. It became a question of whether the same standards would actually apply to senior management.
The original policy had been presented as a company-wide approach to productivity. Yet, according to the account, an exception was sought once the surveillance began producing uncomfortable information about the company's most senior figure.
Workplace Surveillance Can Cut Both Ways
The Reddit discussion also broadened the issue beyond the embarrassing discovery. Several commenters described similar experiences in which companies introduced monitoring systems to police ordinary staff, only for senior executives to become the most prominent users of the services being scrutinised.
Others pointed out that monitoring internet activity can have legitimate cybersecurity benefits. Tracking potentially dangerous websites can help organisations identify malware risks, phishing attempts and other threats, regardless of an employee's position.
That distinction matters. Monitoring carried out for security purposes is different from using detailed browsing histories primarily as a productivity weapon. Either way, consistent rules are essential if employees are expected to accept the system.
The Double Standard Became the Story
The strongest part of the account is ultimately not the founder's browsing habits, but what happened when the system is applied equally to everyone. The founder reportedly wanted objective data on employees. Once that data also captured his own behaviour, HR allegedly sought to remove him from the reports.
It is an anecdote, not independently verified evidence, but its lesson is difficult to miss: workplace surveillance can expose far more than the behaviour management initially wants to investigate. And when the rules are designed to apply to everyone, seniority does not necessarily make someone invisible.
