Friday, Jul 25, 2008
Personal computers were supposed to liberate the workplace. So why do so many companies use them to spy on workers?
Dec 8, 1999 | Worried that your boss knows you've been checking out those nudie sites and sending dirty jokes? You should be.
Just last week the New York Times fired 20 employees at a Virginia payroll processing center for violating corporate policy by sending "inappropriate and offensive" e-mail, and the Navy reported that it disciplined more than 500 employees at a Pennsylvania supply depot for sending sexually explicit e-mail. Xerox fired 40 people in October for violating company computer policies and Boeing has fired a few on similar grounds too. Such cases hardly come as a surprise: 45 percent of major U.S. companies engage in "electronic monitoring of communications and performances," according to a 1999 survey conducted by the American Management Association (AMA).
Many firms contend that this "monitoring" -- defined by the survey as the storage and review of e-mail, voice mail messages, computer files, even telephone conversations and videos of employee job performance -- is a tool to measure employee productivity. Some companies, including the Times, only check employee e-mail when they've been apprised of a violation of corporate policy, but others routinely monitor computer activities to identify employees who are slacking on the job or whose X-rated surfing habits or e-mail messages could potentially expose a company to sexual harassment suits. And surveillance software marketed by companies like Telemate.Net promises even more. Telemate.Net says it can help employers detect security breaches, "monitor employees' compliance with Internet and voice network usage policies and detect abuse" and "measure productivity of Internet and telephone-based sales activities."
"After all, an employee's at work to do work," says Eric Rolfe Greenberg, director of management studies at the AMA. "Employers have a legitimate interest in a worker's performance."
Privacy advocates, of course, are up in arms. "Companies should not be monitoring their employees unless they have proof they're failing to complete their work or misusing company resources," says Andrew Shen, a policy analyst for Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). "To do so is a violation of their right to privacy."
Wouldn't you be absolutely irate if you found out your company was recording and listening to the phone calls you made? It's a practice that would be understandable if those calls related directly to your job performance, as they would if you were a telemarketer, but not in too many other industries. Why shouldn't employees have the same expectations about their e-mail or meanderings on the Web? It is called a personal computer, after all.
But the troubling truth is that employers can monitor every word typed and every site visited on a company-owned computer -- and be completely within the law.
Unlike a cop wiretapping your phone, your boss needs no subpoena, no suspicion that you've ever wasted an iota of company time, before reading your e-mail or employing surveillance software to track your Web surfing habits. And there are few laws challenging the corporate view that any information sent or received by an employee's computer is company property. Connecticut is the only state, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), whose laws require companies to disclose their monitoring practices to employees. Not a single state has outlawed the practice.
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