I once met a Weasel Fluffer.
A Swiffer?
I don’t have an AmEx card any more (tired of small convenience shop owners yelling at me to use Visa!), but I suspect their site works similarly to many others I use for work and play. Don’t think just jiggling the mouse will do the trick, pretty sure, though. That would be nice, but no dice, I don’t think.
But, as always, there are browser extensions to refresh pages like that. There’s a good one for Firefox (don’t remember the name) that is easy to set refresh intervals and recall settings for each site or specific page from a site, as one revisits such-and-such a page over the months and so forth.
IME, eventually a given site will time out anyway, but I’m certain it depends on how picky the site is about user interactions &c.
Agreed that is an annoyance…security, sure, but if one is at home or some “unidentified secure location,” you know, one can use one’s own discretion.
Yes, Please!
Lots of managers have plenty of better things to do… but waste their time on the stupid picayune stuff anyway.
Or institutional devices, that have remote-access software built in by the institution before the device ever reaches the user. There was a scandal some years back where a school district was using the cameras in the school-issued laptops to spy on students when they were at home.
My wife was just wondering why I was laughing so hard…
In my anectdote above, we in IT ultimately determined that the untrusting manager was simply that: An untrusting manager. One sarcastic guy 
suggested responding with “Well, who’s the idiot who hired such a slacker?” but his colleagues figured that wouldn’t go over well. One of the reasons we set our policy of getting HR involved at the early stages was to curb that kind of ‘supervisory paranoia’ without completely eliminating it. We weren’t saying his suspicsions were always wrong; we were just saying HR should be a part of the matter so that, if he was getting to be too spy-happy& HR also had the authority to rein him in.
Eventually, the employee in question (in my anectdote above) simply wasn’t making his monthly quotas and that was enough to let him go.$ Essentially, he didn’t survive his probationary period.
–G!
& ‘Wilbur, you’re complaining about your team members slacking off while you’re spending 90% of your day analyzing their mouse-clicks? You don’t find that ironic?’
$ Sales is a tough job! I couldn’t do it. My understanding is that a corporate salesperson has to exceed a certain goal by a certain percentage, each year. Then having done that, their number for the successful year becomes their baseline for the new year, which they must then exceed by that percentage. That just seems like an ever-increasing spiral that can’t possibly be maintained.
Frustratingly, that doesn’t say how they got caught, or what sort of jiggler (hardware or software) was used.
At my previous job, it wasn’t just about you being seen as idle, the management was also tracking what time you left a “timestamp” by performing an action on files, in software, etc. So a jiggler would have done no good.
It’s possible that the bank was able to tell that even though the workers never went “idle,” they went 1-2 hours without entering into a customer’s bank account and performing any work, or something of that sort.
The IT department at my employer looks for those because they leave the computer unlocked, though it’s supposed to lock automatically after ten minutes of inactivity.
I saw a variant of that article & knew exactly what the bump would be w/o even opening this thread; I was right.