Can’t I have some privacy?

In the modern world, probably not.

I recently started a remote gig and the company asked me to set up Hubstaff or my hours would not be counted. So what is Hubstaff? It’s essentially a monitoring and time-tracking tool that spies tracks your actions to see if you’re working as intended. They claim not to perform keystroke logging, access your camera, or monitor your email, but since the software is proprietary, it deserves more scrutiny.

Is it safe?

Personally, I’m still evaluating its safety and whether it really respects at least some of your privacy, but someone with more time and expertise should do this, and there are probably articles about its safety, since Hubstaff (both the company and the software) is not exactly new; it was established in 2012, according to Wikipedia.

Under this pressure, under this weight

So I installed it. But my OS was not a common one, and at first I expected it to be Windows-only. Surprisingly, they have builds for macOS and Linux. From what I could gather, Hubstaff is written in C++, which makes it portable. So which system do I use? NixOS, a very niche but highly technical OS for fans of reproducible builds and functional programming nerds (like me). This actually gives NixOS an edge, as it’s used by very capable people, and often by very knowledgeable, experienced engineers and specialists.

Is it available?

Yes, it’s available on NixOS, and you don’t need to do any manual building, porting, or patching, as the NixOS contributors have already packaged it.

• You can either run it via nix-shell or nix shell (flake-based)

  # classic
  nix-shell -p hubstaff
  HubstaffClient # Yes, this is the actual exe name

  # flakes
  nix shell nixpkgs#hubstaff
  HubstaffClient # Yes, this is the actual exe name

• You can also install it by adding it to your package list:

  { pkgs, lib, ... }:
  {
    # Infamous unfree predicate
    nixpkgs.config.allowUnfreePredicate = pkg:
      builtins.elem (lib.getName pkg) [
        "hubstaff"
      ];
    environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
      hubstaff
    ];
  }

• If you’re running the nixos-unstable channel, you can just use the newer allowUnfreePackages:

  { pkgs, ... }:
  {
    nixpkgs.config.allowUnfreePackages = [
      "hubstaff"
    ];
    environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
      hubstaff
    ];
  }

Final Thoughts

This might be unrelated, but I realised that big companies are becoming more controlling, and the task I had to do was AI-related. I have since stopped the tasks, not because I dislike AI, but because the job itself was tedious, the pay was meagre and took two weeks to arrive, and to make it all worse, the platform would crash every few days due to an overload of task workers.

My advice is not to get lured by these data-labelling and AI training gigs; a lot of them are severely improvised.