FocusUp exists to help teams improve, not to surveil them. Transparency is a product decision, not a setting.
Paid hours come from timesheets each person confirms and their manager approves — never from an activity percentage. Time without keyboard or mouse input is not deducted automatically: meetings, reading, thinking and work away from the computer are labeled by the person and counted; calendar meetings are recognized automatically. AI focus insights are coaching for the member and are never used to calculate pay.
Admins generate a monitoring notice from their actual settings, with the paragraphs New York, Connecticut, Delaware, Ontario, the UK, the EU and Japan require, and every member acknowledges it (exportable record). Whenever a manager opens someone's timesheet, timeline or screenshots, the member sees it in “Who viewed your data”. Members can delete their own screenshots.
The agent is always visible while running. We do not build hidden or covert monitoring, and we decline requests to add it. Covert monitoring destroys trust and drives turnover; transparent monitoring does not.
Every member can see 100% of the data collected about them — the same sessions, screenshots, app usage and AI reports their managers see. This is enforced by the product and cannot be switched off.
Before the first minute is tracked, the desktop app shows exactly what is collected, why, and who can see it. Consent is timestamped and stored.
Admins choose screenshots off / on / blurred, the capture interval, and whether URLs are stored in full or reduced to domains. No keystroke logging — only whether input was active.
Set how long sessions and screenshots are kept (7–365 days). Older data, including screenshots in object storage, is purged automatically.
US written-notice model supported out of the box. EU compliance mode (no screenshots, domain-only URLs, retention capped at 90 days, DPIA template) ships built in.
No keystroke contents, no webcam, no microphone, no emotion or sentiment inference, no productivity ranking of individuals. FocusUp records work time, apps and sites, and an input-activity level (counts only). This keeps deployments outside the prohibited practices of the EU AI Act (Art. 5 — emotion recognition at work) and California AB 1883 (emotion inference and neural data in workplace monitoring), and inside the written-notice rules of New York, Connecticut and Delaware.
Reports exist to replace hand-written status updates and to document billable work — for the member as much as for the manager. Screenshots are off for every new workspace; when a client-billing team turns them on, members see the same images.