Work HCI Data: What it Is, Who it Belongs to, and the Need for Regulation

Abstract

Both the LGPD (General Data Protection Law) and the data protection bills currently pending in the National Congress do not prescribe sufficient guidelines on the use of human-computer interaction (HCI) data from work, whether for monitoring working hours or for application toward other purposes, which allows corporate interests and collective damages to remain inadequately characterized. This article seeks to contribute to filling this gap by discussing the production of workplace HCI through computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) software and the challenges in implementing public policies that protect workers’ know-how. To this end, we start from the empirical focus of the work of media (which includes a datafication experiment), in addition to reviewing parts of the academic literature on the subject and the corporate documentation of socio-digital platforms (terms of use, privacy policies, financial statements, patents, etc.), especially Google, Meta and Alphabet. The theoretical deepening regarding what the data is, its quality, and the purpose of its capture helps clarify the economic functioning of the digital data productive chain [Lastres et al., 2025], and reveals the specificities of non-personal data—above all, data from work processes. The results presented in the analyses aim to support public policies to regulate how companies should proceed when appropriating workplace HCI.

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