Teramind is a comprehensive security and user behavior analytics platform used by organizations worldwide to detect insider threats, prevent data leaks, optimize productivity, and ensure regulatory compliance. Whether the goal is streamlining operational workflows, measuring remote team engagement, or protecting sensitive intellectual property, Teramind provides the deep visibility needed to make data-driven decisions.

Because the software collects granular activity data from user endpoints to generate these insights, it creates a responsibility to use these powerful tools ethically. To support this, we have designed Teramind with a "Privacy-by-Design" architecture. Our goal is to balance an organization's need for performance data and security with the legitimate privacy rights of employees.

With Teramind, you can configure the system to track only the specific metrics your organization requires, alleviating legal and ethical concerns. In this article, we will show you how to configure Teramind to gain the critical insights you need without casting too broad a net.

Rather than applying a "one-size-fits-all" policy, use Monitoring Profiles to tailor data collection to specific roles. For example, you might enable Social Media monitoring for your Marketing department (where it is relevant to their job) but disable it entirely for Engineering or HR.

Furthermore, Teramind supports integration with Active Directory, which can be used to seamlessly sync your existing users, computers, and Organizational Units (OUs) directly into Teramind. Beyond simple importing, this integration allows you to leverage Active Directory Groups and LDAP attributes to automate privacy policies. For example, you can configure the system to automatically apply restricted monitoring profiles to specific groups, such as executives or contractors or use attributes to filter reports, ensuring data is viewed in the correct context.

From the Edit monitoring profile screen, you can disable entire channels of data collection that are not relevant to your business goals. For example, if your primary goal is time tracking, or, you are unsure about keystroke logging regulations in your local jurisdiction, you can turn Keystrokes channel completely to ensure compliance.

For highly sensitive enterprise environments, Teramind can also supply a custom version of the Teramind Agent with certain functionalities hard-disabled, ensuring that even administrators cannot enable them.

To protect employee privacy, and maintain a healthy work-life balance, you can configure monitoring to be active only during designated work hours. This is particularly important for remote workers using personal devices (BYOD), ensuring that personal time remains strictly private. Here's how you can configure the monitoring schedule:

Since applications and websites are the primary sources of user activity data collected by Teramind, configuring their monitoring settings is one of the most important steps in establishing a privacy-friendly and compliant monitoring environment. The following sections detail the essential configuration strategies within Teramind's Applications and Websites monitoring profiles, designed to enforce the principle of 'data minimization' by using precise whitelists, blacklists, and dynamic content filters to ensure monitoring is strictly limited to work-related activity.

When you enable Monitor all apps and keystrokes, or the Monitor all websites and keystrokes option, all apps and websites are tracked by default. However, by using the Exception button, you can explicitly list applications or websites that are strictly personal or handle sensitive, non-work data. This might include applications like a personal email client or provider (e.g., mail.google.com/personal-account), private messaging software (e.g., WhatsApp), online banking portals, social media, or personal shopping sites.. When an application or website is placed on the exception list, Teramind automatically suspends all monitoring and screen recording. This directly protects the employee's most private data, like login credentials and personal communications.

With the Monitor all apps and keystrokes option under Applications monitoring settings, you can add extra conditions (IP, Range, CIDR, or List) to the exceptions themselves. This allows for advanced privacy controls. For instance, if you define your corporate office IP range as a condition, you can configure monitoring to only be active when the employee is on the corporate network. When the employee is working from a remote, non-corporate IP address (like their home or a café), the exceptions can be configured to broaden, effectively disabling monitoring entirely or switching to a highly restricted, privacy-centric profile. This ensures monitoring is limited only to the high-risk, controlled corporate environment.

Similarly, Websites monitoring has two options: Monitor all IPs and Monitor only selected IPs. These can be used to define where web monitoring is active, adding a geographical or network boundary to data collection. For example, if an employee is using their personal computer or a company laptop connected to their verified home network, that specific home network IP (or range) can be added as an exception. This ensures that as soon as the agent recognizes the user is connecting from that non-corporate location, all web activity related to websites are temporarily suspended, respecting the privacy of the user's personal environment.

For organizations prioritizing maximum default privacy, the optimal approach is to enable the Monitor only selected apps and keystrokes and Monitor only selected websites and keystrokes options.

When these settings are active, the system adopts a 'deny-all' default state, ignoring every application and website automatically. Monitoring is effectively disabled until the administrator explicitly defines the scope. Using the Add button, administrators can create a strict inclusion list containing only the specific apps/sites (e.g., CRM.exe or FinancialPortal.com) required to be monitored for business purposes.

Because this list is restrictive by nature, any new applications installed by the user, personal browsing, or non-work communications are automatically excluded from monitoring. This ensures the highest level of privacy and significantly reduces data volume, aligning perfectly with global data minimization principles.

The options Don't monitor keystrokes for these applications and Don't monitor keystrokes for these websites enable data minimization by allowing you to capture general activity data (e.g., time tracking) while strictly excluding the most sensitive input. Their primary purpose is to prevent the collection of highly sensitive information, such as user credentials, personal data or communications, while allowing monitoring to continue for security and productivity logging.

The Don’t monitor websites that contain these words or terms is a highly effective privacy tool because it automatically provides a blanket layer of protection through dynamic content analysis, rather than relying on manually updated URL lists. By inputting sensitive keywords like "password", "login", "bank account", or terms related to private forms, the system is configured to immediately cease monitoring upon detecting that content on any loaded webpage. This feature ensures that monitoring dynamically retreats the moment a user accesses a page likely to contain PII or credentials, providing a critical safety net that upholds user privacy by default across both expected and unfamiliar websites.

The Monitor keystrokes for password fields in desktop apps and Monitor keystrokes for password fields in browser are useful for enforcing data minimization by automatically excluding the most sensitive data. By keeping these options disabled, Teramind leverages application and web standards to identify and automatically suspend keystroke logging within recognized password input boxes across all applications and websites. This ensures that while general user activity is still monitored for security or productivity audits, the user's actual credentials are universally protected from collection, establishing a fundamental, system-wide layer of privacy.

The Don’t monitor private browsing is a direct and powerful privacy setting that respects a user's intent to keep specific web activity private. When enabled, the system recognizes a browser's private mode (like Incognito or InPrivate) and immediately halts all monitoring for that session, meaning no URLs are logged, no keystrokes are recorded, and no screen recordings are taken. This simple control provides a crucial privacy boundary, ensuring that personal web use which is outside the scope of legitimate work monitoring is reliably excluded from data collection, thereby building trust and simplifying privacy compliance.

Screen recording is a high-impact monitoring tool that requires careful configuration to maintain privacy. To reduce data volume, we recommend configuring exception-based capture rather than recording continuously. Use the settings below to define precise recording triggers, retention limits, and offline rules, ensuring your policy collects only what is necessary for security.

This configuration, achieved by enabling the Record only when behavior rule was violated setting, is the most effective way to reduce video storage and alleviate privacy concerns. It shifts the monitoring model from continuous surveillance to exception monitoring, capturing the screen only when a security or compliance rule is broken (in conjunction with the Record rule action). This limits data collection strictly to necessary forensic evidence and achieves significant data minimization.

To respect a user's intent to pause work and ensure personal time is excluded, the Record locked sessions option should be disabled. The Agent will then stop tracking as soon as the user locks their computer (e.g., steps away for a personal break), preventing the system from capturing the lock screen or counting the locked time toward work hours. This effectively excludes non-work time from the recorded data set.

The Allow remote control setting controls the availability of the powerful, yet intrusive Remote Control and Freeze Input features in the Session Player. For privacy and trust, it should be disabled unless essential and justified for IT support or security intervention. Disabling it ensures that administrators cannot gain unauthorized, real-time access to the user's desktop, protecting the session's confidentiality.

When intervention is necessary, strict adherence to transparency is recommended. Administrators can use the During remote control and During input freeze fields to display prominent notifications, ensuring that employees are fully aware and informed during any desktop takeover event.

The Delete history after setting controls how long collected video data is stored, which is a core pillar of data minimization for On-Premises/Private Cloud customers. Administrators must specify the minimum number of days (e.g., 30 or 90 days) required to meet legal and compliance needs. This configuration ensures that video recordings are automatically deleted after the defined retention period, reducing the organizational risk associated with storing sensitive historical data for longer than is strictly necessary. It also helps reducing the storage requirements.

The Offline Recording option is highly relevant for remote worker privacy as it dictates data collection when the employee is disconnected from the corporate network, which frequently happens during personal time at home. The most private configuration is to turn off the option completely, ensuring no screen activity is captured off-network. If offline recording is mandated for security, administrators must severely reduce the Offline recording’s buffer length (e.g., from 24 hours to 2) and/or set a low Offline recording’s buffer size limit. These steps minimize the volume of potentially sensitive, non-work-related video data captured locally on the remote worker's device before it can be transmitted upon reconnection.

While Applications, Websites, and Screen Recording channels capture the bulk of user activity, ensuring a privacy-compliant environment requires fine-tuning the remaining channels. These options govern how data is collected from communications (e.g., Emails, Instant Messaging), peripherals (e.g., Audio, Printing), and environmental factors (e.g., Network, Geolocation). The goal is to strictly apply the data minimization principle across all data sources, collecting only what is adequate, relevant, and necessary for your stated business purpose.

This channel can be highly intrusive as it records system sounds and conversations. Audio monitoring should almost always be disabled by toggling the channel off unless there is a strong, explicit, and legally justified business requirement. If necessary, administrators should use the Monitor when these applications use the microphone option, configuring it to record audio only when specific work-related applications (like voice-over-IP software) are actively utilizing the input device, rather than recording continuously.

Files monitoring should be focused exclusively on corporate data movement to avoid capturing personal documents. Instead of tracking all files, use the File Types to restrict monitoring specific file types such as documents. Use the File locations to skip option to explicitly exclude monitoring on personal folders (e.g., \Personal) and system directories, confining data collection strictly to corporate assets.

Network tracking captures communication data and application connections, which can expose non-work activity. You can disable monitoring of secure content by turning off the SSL option, which stops the capture of content from web-based emails and social media. Alternatively, use the Monitor only selected IPs option to restrict monitoring only to the corporate network range, automatically excluding all traffic occurring when the employee is on a non-corporate, home network.

Emails monitoring captures private correspondence and requires fine-grained control to protect content and attachments. To protect communication content, disable Monitor email content and Capture email attachments options if only metadata is needed. Use Monitor emails apps to only monitor official clients (e.g., Outlook) and don't monitor private emails such as Yahoo Mail or Gmail.

These channels often mix professional and personal use, demanding function-based restriction. Use the Track these applications option to restrict tracking exclusively to platforms and apps relevant to a specific role (e.g., social media platforms used by the Marketing team, chat channel used by the Support, online meetings used for Sales calls). This ensures that a user's personal activity on excluded social media and IM platforms is ignored, minimizing data collection based on job necessity.

Tracking physical location is highly sensitive, especially for remote staff. Geolocation tracking should be disabled unless explicitly justified.

Printing controls mitigate the risk of content leakage while offering privacy controls. To avoid capturing sensitive content, configure Content capturing to select the Document’s name only, rather than the Actual document option. Furthermore, use the Don't monitor these printers field to ignore printers known to be used for personal tasks (e.g., a home label printer). This way, you can restrict monitoring to high-risk, corporate printing events only.

By default, Teramind Cloud stores screen recordings for six months and other data (e.g. activity logs) until the account is canceled. You can extend the screen recording retention for an additional fee.

If you want better control over data retention, use the On-Premises or Private Cloud deployment option. This way you can configure how long the data will be kept including any backups and archived copies.

The Delete history after setting in Screen Recording monitoring settings allows On-Premises/Private Cloud customers to specify how long collected video data is stored (see above).

The Configurations > Settings > Security screen has a few options that can be configured to restrict data flow:

Teramind On-Premises/Private Cloud customers can delete the actual records from their server if wanted. Cloud customers can contact [email protected] to help remove records for compliance purposes.

The Live View > Snapshots dashboard and the Employee's Details screen comes with a Add/Remove Time option that allows administrators to retroactively correct monitoring errors and protect sensitive data that was accidentally or unnecessarily captured.

In the Add/Remove Time panel, the Remove time and screen records is the most direct privacy option to select. If an administrator finds that a segment of activity was entirely personal (e.g., an employee logged in briefly over the weekend for a personal task) or was collected in error, choosing this permanently deletes both the time record and the associated video evidence. The Remove time and restrict screen records option enforces confidentiality by removing the general work time log but retaining the screen recording, making it viewable only by personnel with the Restricted historic screen stream access permission. This ensures sensitive, but necessary, evidence is protected from general managerial view.

While Teramind's policies and rules are usually implemented to protect the data of the company and its customers, they can be strategically configured to actively protect employee privacy as well. They are an effective means of achieving privacy-friendly monitoring because they allow the organization to move away from intrusive continuous monitoring toward targeted, exception-based intervention, thus strongly enforcing 'data minimization' and 'purpose limitation'. These rules link a specific user action or content violation to an automated response, ensuring that the system only captures, alerts on, or intervenes in activity directly relevant to security or compliance, while leaving routine, harmless work activity unmonitored.

Some effective use of rules for privacy are:

Teramind Revealed Agent is highly effective for privacy-friendly monitoring because it embodies the principles of transparency and employee awareness. By placing a visible UI on the desktop, it ensures monitoring is conducted lawfully and fairly, addressing legal requirements for consent. It also includes controls (like a web clock-in/out) that enable the employee to manually suspend monitoring during personal time or breaks. This not only builds trust but also empowers the user to enforce data minimization themselves by clearly defining the boundary between work and private activity.

When using the Stealth Agent, you can fulfill transparency requirements by creating a behavior rule designed to display a constant privacy notice to employees. This action ensures users are informed of monitoring status. See the Useful Resources below for detailed instructions on rule creation.

To ensure transparency and simplify compliance, consider allowing employees to view their own collected monitoring data.

On the Employee's Profile > Account tab, several options enable this, such as allowing users to log in to their own dashboards, enable self-history (session) playback, and permit viewing of their activity reports.

This practice not only fosters a transparent work environment but also helps your organization comply with key GDPR requirements, specifically the "Right to be Informed" and the "Right of access" (Subject Access Request or SAR). By giving employees this access, they immediately know what data is collected and have an easy mechanism to obtain a copy of their personal data.

The core of privacy-friendly monitoring in Teramind is implemented through strict Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), ensuring the principle of 'need-to-know' is enforced for all monitoring data.

Account access level for individuals can be set from an employee's profile (under the Account tab. with progressive access privileges, such as the Employee who only views their own data, and the Infrastructure Admin who is explicitly prevented from browsing session recordings to prevent unauthorized viewing of sensitive employee information. While the high-privilege Administrator roles have broad access, a privacy-focused implementation demands that their actions be rigorously audited ('zero trust' principle) to prevent misuse, thereby guaranteeing that monitoring data remains confidential and is viewed only by personnel explicitly authorized to see it.

Teramind’s Access Control policies provide a more granular and flexible alternative to the fixed permissions inherent in standard account access levels. Configured via the Configurations > Access Control screen, this feature enables administrators to define highly specific policies that strictly govern non-admin users and department managers.

This segmented approach ensures that users hold only the minimum permissions necessary for their roles, preventing the security risks associated with blanket administrative rights and guaranteeing that access to sensitive monitoring data, such as screen recordings and reports - remains strictly segmented and controlled.

These controls add an additional layer of security to lock down access to the dashboard from those with unauthorized access and to protect employee data in case of stolen credentials. Teramind supports several authentication options: basic user/password authentication, 2 factor authentication (enforceable for both admins and regular employees), SSO (over SAML 2.0), Active Directory LDAP, and IP whitelist. Note that some of these options may not be available to Cloud deployments. You can access these settings from the Configurations > Settings > Authentication tab. Check out the links under Useful Resources below for more information.

Privacy-friendly monitoring requires oversight of privileged users, which is achieved through the Audit dashboard - a specialized tool designed to enforce a 'zero trust' approach by watching the watchers. This dashboard records a chronological and immutable log of all activities performed by administrators and privileged users within the Teramind platform, tracking actions like configuration changes to monitoring policies, administrator logins/logouts, and access to sensitive reports. By establishing a complete audit trail of "Who did What, When," the system ensures accountability and integrity among its most powerful users, preventing the misuse of access to confidential employee data and providing necessary documentation for regulatory compliance (e.g., GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, etc.).

While Teramind provides powerful analytics, digital footprints rarely tell the whole story. Some data insights, particularly those tied to employee performance, require human context. Software reports should support, not replace, management decisions. To ensure fairness and compliance with regulations like GDPR Article 22, never base personnel evaluations solely on automated processing; always apply human judgment and discretion.

Protect employee identities when exporting reports for external stakeholders or wider analysis. Utilize various reports configurations feature (such as hide columns from the grid widget, or apply data minimization filters) to remove names and personal details, ensuring the focus remains on aggregate trends rather than individual surveillance.

For organizations adhering to strict privacy standards, we recommend using the TMHASHUSERNAMES installation parameter for the Windows Agent to implement a 'blind monitoring' strategy. This configuration enforces pseudonymization at the source by converting employee names into randomized hash strings before data is recorded. This ensures that while management retains full visibility into critical organizational insights, such as security threats, compliance gaps, and operational trends, managers cannot view identifiable personal activities. By technically decoupling the activity from the individual, this approach guarantees that monitoring is used strictly for organizational health rather than personal surveillance.

While Teramind Cloud deployment offers best in class privacy and security for your organizations and employees, if you want full control of your data, you should opt for Teramind On-Premises or Private Cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP) deployment option. Especially if you are concerned about laws such as cross-border sharing or to avoid taking responsibility for a third-party data breach, avoid signing a BAA (business associate agreement), etc. If this is the case, considering a deployment option like these might be your only choice to ensure not only data privacy but also compliance with regulations.

The primary objective of End-to-End Encryption (E2EE) is to enhance the data flow security, by combining envelope encryption with end-to-end encryption for all communications between the Agent and Server(s). If you want the most privacy for your data, you can consider E2EE. When E2EE is enabled, the data will be encrypted at all points from its origin to its consumption or presentation. The data will only be viewable by those with decryption keys and passphrases. In other words, E2EE prevents unintended users, including privileged users, from reading or modifying data.

There is some concern that employee monitoring and data loss prevention solutions may create conflict with employee and customer privacy rights. The recent surge of privacy regulations across the globe is raising confusion about such solutions for many. Does employee monitoring violate any GDPR statute? Or, does it help protect them? Is my remote employee in Brazil protected under LGPD or GDPL? How should executives and law enforcement officials effectively weigh the demands to control and protect their businesses while protecting the legitimate privacy rights of employees and others whose personal data are being threatened?

To address these challenges, Teramind has released a Privacy Analysis white paper, which serves as a technical and strategic guide for navigating this complex landscape. This document outlines how user activity monitoring can coexist with rigorous privacy frameworks like GDPR and CCPA by moving away from binary choices and towards a privacy-friendly configuration. It details actionable strategies, such as implementing Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC) to limit admin visibility, utilizing the Revealed Agent for full user transparency, and deploying automated data minimization tactics that only record activity during specific rule violations. By following these guidelines, organizations can maintain necessary oversight for security and productivity without compromising ethical standards or legal compliance.

Check out the link below to download the white paper.

These resources provide external and platform-specific insights into managing privacy, compliance, and implementing ethical monitoring strategies.

These articles, guides, and op-eds by Teramind experts focus on platform-specific compliance, operational strategy, and ethical deployment models.

These articles and regulatory guides focus on best practices for data privacy, compliance (GDPR/CCPA), and establishing trust in hybrid work environments.