Your Boss is Reading Your E-mail

Brian Kimball
6 Dec 00
Computer Ethics

      The rapidly increasing use of computers in the workplace has given employers the ability to easily track an employee's actions throughout the workday. Activities can be continuously monitored without the employee's knowledge and used to evaluate his performance. This new technology brings up several ethical issues concerning both privacy and business ethics. Since there are essentially no laws governing the monitoring of employees, it is up to the employees and corporations to decide where the line must be drawn between employee privacy, and the company's right to know what their employees are doing at the workplace. Employees should have some rights to privacy at work, but employers also need the ability to evaluate the performance of employees.

      As a starting place in trying to determine which types of monitoring procedures are appropriate in the workplace, it might be best to examine the current legal restrictions on the activity. According to current laws, employers have the right to freely monitor employees while they are at work. Organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) are pushing to create laws that would govern the monitoring of employees in the workplace. The ACLU is not completely against employee monitoring, but they are working at the federal and state levels to pass legislation that would prevent employers from abusing employee's rights to privacy. Although computer monitoring is still completely unregulated, some states have begun to place restrictions on other types of monitoring. For instance, in California the law requires that businesses play either a beep or a short message to inform both parties on the phone that their call is being monitored. In Connecticut, legislation has been passed to prevent employers from placing hidden cameras "in areas designated for the health or personal comfort of employees" such as bathrooms and locker rooms. Although this is a start, there are still many types of monitoring that are not appropriate and are still allowed by today's laws.

      Companies use many types of technology to monitor employee performance. Even before computers were widely used, phone recordings and video cameras were used to record the actions of employees. Computers can be used to monitor users in several different ways. Software can be used to view an employee's screen while they are working, or to look at the contents of the computer's hard drive remotely. This can easily give viewers access to e-mail and other personal documents that reside on the workstation. Another approach is to monitor keystrokes. This is usually used in data entry types of occupations to track the speed and reliability of the employee. Computer software may also be used to track the amount of time the computer remains idle so that time spent at the desk working on the computer can be evaluated. These methods of computer monitoring can all be performed with or without the employee's knowledge. Monitoring techniques like this may be effective in some situations, but are not always a good indicator of overall performance. An employee who spends a great deal of time helping other employees, for instance, will appear to be idle for a large portion of the workday, even though they are actually hard at work. If used properly though, these tools can be a valuable resource for judging productivity without invading an employee's privacy.

      Some amount of employee monitoring may be necessary to successfully evaluate employee performance, but there is a limit to the types of monitoring employers should be allowed to engage in. There are several examples of companies taking employee monitoring too far. For instance, companies could monitor employees to see if they're trying to start or join a union or determine if they smoke and are therefore a possible health risk. (Downes, The Spy who Employed Me ) Part of the problem with employee monitoring is that it is difficult to tell the difference between personal and private e-mails, phone calls, etc. until it is possibly too late. Employers should not have the right to read personal e-mails or listen in on personal conversations without the permission of the employee. It is reasonable to expect that employers would want to monitor the usage of their equipment for personal use, but it is the amount of this usage that is really important, not the content of the e-mails, phone calls, etc. It is also possible that employee monitoring could adversely effect productivity. The lack of trust in the employee that monitoring shows could lead to a lessened desire to perform well in some employees. This is possibly the reason why much of the monitoring that occurs in the workplace is done without the employee's knowledge.

      One other problem with employee monitoring is that information gathered may be stored permanently for access at any future time. This allows employers to go back into the records and look at an employee's actions for years into the past. Using this information, employers could go back and read any e-mail an employee has sent or received and even search for a particular piece of personal or work related information. Even e-mail and files that the user intentionally deleted could still be searched for incriminating information. There is also the risk that persons outside the company could gain access to this data and use it to look at an employee's record.

      One argument given by many employers is that they should be allowed to perform any type of monitoring that they feel is necessary since they own the equipment being used. Even if the equipment is owned by the corporation, this should not give the employers the right to monitor things like personal e-mails.

      Another thing to consider is whether or not computer monitoring is necessary for performance evaluation at all. Employers don't necessarily need to watch everything an employee does to be able to judge the quality of the work he outputs. Performance monitoring should be less of a concern for salaried employees, since they can easily be evaluated by their ability to complete tasks and meet deadlines effectively. Hourly employees on the other hand may be harder to track at such a high level and require monitoring for accurate performance evaluation.

      As it stands right now, employers have too much power to invade the privacy of employees in the workplace. Employees need some legal backbone to protect their rights to privacy in the workplace. Employee monitoring does not need to be completely stopped, it does however need to be regulated. Many of the suggested rights given by the ACLU would help to make sure that employers do not go too far in their efforts to monitor employees. These suggested rights are: · Notice to employees of the company's electronic monitoring practices. · Use of a signal to let an employee know when he or she is being monitored. · Employee access to all personal electronic data collected through monitoring. · No monitoring of areas designed for the health or comfort of employees. · The right to dispute and delete inaccurate data. · A ban on the collection of data unrelated to work performance. · Restrictions on the disclosure of personal data to others without the employee's consent. (ACLU, Privacy in America: Electronic Monitoring) With these rights protected by law, employees would be able to work without the fear that their employer could misuse their personal information. These rights would also still allow employers to collect all the information they need to judge work performance without invading the privacy of their employees.

      The swift introduction of computers into the workplace has allowed employers to overstep their bounds in employee monitoring, and it will take some action from the government to correct these problems. Until regulations have been defined, companies should have a privacy policy in place, so employees are informed of monitoring activities. Although monitoring is a necessity in the workplace today, it can easily be misused and needs regulation, but until then employees will have to be responsible for finding out what types of activities their company plans to monitor.


References


Downes, Robert. The Spy Who Employed Me, http://web.cln.com/archives/atlanta/newsstand/092797/cover2.htm

Pincus Hartman, Laura. The Rights and Wrongs of Workplace Snooping, http://www.depaul.edu/ethics/monitor.html

Poteet, Dewey. Employee Privacy in The Public Sector, http://www.akingump.com/labor/publications/att_art1.html

Privacy in America: Electronic Monitoring, http://www.aclu.org/library/pbr2.html

Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, Fact Sheet # 7: Employee Monitoring: Is There Privacy in the Workplace?, http://www.privacyrights.org/FS/fs7-work.htm