Electronic Visit Verification: The Weight of Surveillance and the Fracturing of Care

Abstract

In "Electronic Visit Verification: The Weight of Surveillance and the Fracturing of Care," Data & Society Researcher Alexandra Mateescu finds that the surveillance of US home care workers through a state-funded mobile app called electronic visit verification (“EVV”) erodes critical support for people with disabilities and older adults while offloading significant, unacknowledged burdens onto both workers and service recipients.

Drawing on interviews with advocates, activists, and twenty workers and service recipients across the country, Mateescu describes how the rollout of EVV systems within Medicaid home- and community-based programs was built on a poor understanding of how services are actually provided.

EVV has contributed to the growing landscape of punitive technologies that target and criminalize both low-wage workers and public benefits recipients. EVV systems also extend legacies of devaluation and distrust of the homecare workforce, which is comprised disproportionately of women of color and immigrants. While EVV systems are a workplace management tool in principle, they operate within a service context where the electronic monitoring of workers also indirectly tracks their clients’ activities and movements. The author finds that monitoring through EVV systems not only evokes privacy concerns, but also creates an atmosphere of ambient criminalization that has had a chilling effect on disabled and older people’s daily lives.

Keywords: Care work, labor, employment rights, disability, surveillance, electronic monitoring, elder care, public benefits, home- and community-based services