If your company installed Hubstaff, you were probably told it "tracks time." That's true but incomplete, and the gap between what people assume it captures and what it actually captures runs in both directions — some workers panic about things Hubstaff can't see at all, while others don't realise how visible certain data is.

Here's the accurate picture, feature by feature.

The short version

Your manager can see: hours tracked, an activity percentage for every 10-minute block, screenshots of your screen, which applications and websites you used during tracked time, idle periods, and — on mobile or with the locations add-on — GPS location.

Your manager cannot see: what you actually typed, your screen when the tracker is stopped, anything on a device that doesn't have Hubstaff installed, or your activity outside tracked hours.

The rest of this page is the detail behind those two lists.

Activity percentage: what the number actually means

This is the metric that causes the most anxiety, and it's the most misunderstood.

Hubstaff labels every single second of tracked time as either "active" or "inactive." A second counts as active if there was any keyboard press, mouse movement, mouse click, or scroll wheel input during it. It then takes each 10-minute block — 600 seconds — and reports the percentage that were active.

Active seconds ÷ 600 = activity rate %

That's the whole calculation. It is not a productivity score, a quality measure, or an assessment of your output. It's a count of seconds in which you touched an input device.

Some consequences worth understanding:

Reading is invisible. If you spend ten minutes reading a document without scrolling, that block reports close to 0%.
Meetings score low. Talking on a call generates no keyboard or mouse input.
Touchscreens under-report. Tapping registers as mouse activity, but you lose all the movement between points that a mouse would generate, so touchscreen users tend to show lower percentages for identical work.
Different roles produce wildly different baselines. Data entry and design work naturally score high. Research, writing long-form, and code review score lower. This is a property of the measurement, not of the worker.

Hubstaff's own guidance to employers explicitly discourages using activity rates as quotas or performance scores, and their published organisational average sits around the 50% mark. If your manager is treating 70% as a floor, that expectation is coming from them, not from the tool.

Screenshots

If your organisation has screenshots enabled, Hubstaff captures your screen at random intervals — typically up to three times per 10-minute block on standard plans, and up to ten times per block with the additional screenshots add-on.

Things worth knowing:

Screenshots only happen while the timer is running. Stop the timer, and capture stops.
They capture the whole screen, including any personal tabs, messages, or windows visible at that moment.
You can see your own screenshots. They appear in the Activity section of your own Hubstaff account, attached to the tracked time.
You can usually delete your own. Hubstaff allows users to delete screenshots from time entries that haven't yet been approved or locked — including without admin permissions. Deleting the screenshot typically deletes the associated time too, so this isn't a free action, but the control exists.

Whether screenshots are on at all is an organisational setting. Check your Activity page — if you see images there, they're on.

Apps and URLs

On Starter plans and above, Hubstaff logs which applications you opened and which websites you visited during tracked time. Your manager sees a list of app names and URLs with time spent on each.

This is often more revealing than screenshots, because screenshots are periodic snapshots while app and URL logging is continuous. A personal site visited for two minutes between screenshots still appears in the log.

Important limitation: app and URL data is only captured through the desktop app. Web-based and mobile tracking don't produce it.

Idle time

Hubstaff flags periods with no keyboard or mouse input based on your organisation's idle timeout setting — commonly three to five minutes.

When you cross that threshold, you get a prompt asking whether to keep or discard the idle time. Your answer is recorded. Note that keeping large amounts of flagged idle time is itself visible to your manager, and Hubstaff's documentation lists "workers being hit with inactivity warnings and then keeping the time" as a specific cause of low activity that managers are told to look for.

Unusual activity detection

Organisations on the Insights add-on get an additional layer that flags statistical anomalies rather than raw numbers. It looks for things like sustained input above 95% for over 30 minutes, or activity that fluctuates less than 4% over a 90-minute period — patterns that don't look like human behaviour.

It also maintains a list of known applications that simulate keyboard and mouse input, and flags when one is running on the device.

Worth being clear about the direction this cuts: perfectly consistent, perfectly high activity is more conspicuous than variable activity, not less. Human work is uneven.

The same system flags unusually low keyboard activity, which employers are encouraged to read as a possible sign of disengagement or burnout rather than misconduct.

What Hubstaff does not capture

Keystroke content. Hubstaff records that you typed, not what you typed. There is no keylogger. Your passwords, messages, and document contents are not transmitted.
Anything while the timer is stopped. No screenshots, no app logging, no activity measurement.
Anything on a device without the app. Reading on your phone, or working on a personal laptop that doesn't have Hubstaff installed, is invisible.
Your camera or microphone. Hubstaff does not record webcam or audio.
Phone calls on your personal line.

Who can see your data

By default, your manager and organisation admins. You always have access to your own data — hours, screenshots, activity, app logs — through your own account. If you've never looked at your own Hubstaff dashboard, it's worth doing: it shows you precisely what your employer sees, which is usually less alarming than people assume and occasionally more.

If privacy settings have been enabled for a member, some activity data can be hidden from reports.

If your activity score is being held against you

A few things that are reasonable to raise with a manager, given how the metric actually works:

Ask what the organisational average is. Hubstaff shows this in the dashboard, and it's usually far lower than people expect.
Ask what benchmark applies to your specific role. The tool's own documentation says research- and meeting-heavy roles produce lower scores by design.
Point to app and URL data as context. If your activity was 30% but the app log shows three hours in a document editor, that's a coherent story about deep work rather than absence.

Hubstaff's own best-practice guidance tells employers not to use activity levels as KPIs or quotas. That's a legitimate thing to cite.

What Your Employer Can Actually See in Hubstaff (2026)

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