Ethics of Tracking Software

Sometime last year, a software package came available that allows employers to monitor their workers’ Internet usage. It contains a database of about 45,000 web sites that are categorized as productive, neutral, and rates operators based on their browsing. It identifies the most frequent users and the most popular sites, and it’s called Little Brother. There are also programs to search emails and programs to block objectionable websites, beyond installing monitoring software. Your employer can simply go into your hard drive, check your cache to see where you’ve been on the net, and I read your e-mail. Meanwhile most employees are unaware that while at work their activities are being monitored, and this brings about the question “if the use of tracking software and systems ethical”? Legally, little or all employees have little recourse; the most relevant Federal law, is the 1986 Electronic Communications privacy act which prohibits unauthorized interception of various Electronic Communications, including email. This act exempts service providers from its provisions, which is commonly interpreted to include employers who provide e-mail and Internet access. The EPIC in Washington, DC would have required employers at least to notify workers that they were being monitored, but it failed to come to a vote from 1993 to 1995. To most employers, they have a need to protect their business or organizations from such negligent abuse. When an employer uses a software package that sweeps through the office computers and eliminate games workers have installed, few people will feel such an action as an invasion of privacy. Their comfort with this type of intrusions suggests that most of them don’t fault an employer who insists that the...

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...loyer gives a promise of privacy and that should be respected, if on the other hand, the employer reserves the right to read email or monitor web browsing the worker can be the except those terms or look elsewhere for employment.

In conclusion whether employees should have the right to privacy in the workplace or not, is an issue. But there are many arguments in favor of employee privacy, but there are also strong reasons why an organization simply cannot grant this right to its workers. These reasons consist of: financial loss and information security. The use of tracking software in systems is ethical because this serves the greater good in respect to the general public. The principle that needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few over one is the cornerstone of the ethics that rule this society. (Yerby (“Nine theories of ethics that rule the world”))