Privacy in the Workplace
Employers want to be sure their employees are doing a good job, but employees do not want their every movement and thought logged. Technology now makes it possible for employers to keep track of virtually all workplace communications made by any employee. This monitoring includes supervision of telephone conversations, voicemail, e-mails and Internet use. Such supervision is virtually unfettered. Therefore, unless company policy specifically states otherwise your employer may listen to, watch and read most of your workplace exchanges.
Federal law has loose regulations on the monitoring of work related phone calls. Companies may monitor employees’ conversations with clients or customers for quality control. A few states require that a tone or beep must sound to alert the caller that he or she is being monitored. For the most part, employers are allowed to monitor work calls unannounced. Personal calls are a different story. Most calls from the office are screened, so a personal call may be screened accidentally. However, when the supervisor realizes the call is personal, he or she must stop listening to the call at once. The majority of companies also keep records of all calls dialed and the lengths of those calls.
“More than 20 million people use e-mail in the United States-including 60 percent of employees at Fortune 2000 Companies and 75 percent of respondents to a survey of members of SHRM” (McCune 39). Companies are allowed to read electronic and voice mails that travel through their system. The company owns the infrastructure and therefore has the right to examine its contents. People may think that since they have to use a password to access their mailbox the messages it contains will be kept private. Contrariwise, even once a person has deleted a voice or electronic mail, the message is often backed up along with other data from the computer. Several workplace privacy court cases of this type have been decided in the employer’s favor.
The monitoring of activities on employees computers is the most explicit infringement of workplace privacy. An employer may monitor idle time spent on an employee’s keyboard or record all of the keystrokes made on it. A key logger is a program that records every keystroke entered on computer. This computer software tells the manager how many keystrokes per hour each employee is performing. However, than may also be used to read private e-mails or documents the employee is composing. Lastly, employers may use programs that enable them to view what is on a workers screen or stored in the employee’s hard drive.
In Fitbit for Bosses written by Lynn Stuart Parramore she talks about how bosses want to start monitoring their employees. Parramore shows her discomfort with this idea. She thinks that “big money seems poised to trump privacy”(Parramore). Which basically just means that for bosses is that money is over everything even privacy. Allowing bosses to monitor their employees is dishonest and manipulating.Some researchers have also found out that increasing surveillance has caused the decrease of productivity. Researchers warned them that the data can have big errors and people that look at the data that the fitbits can cherry-pick the information that supports their beliefs and ditch the rest of the information that leads to racial profiling. “Surveillance makes everyone seem suspicious, creating perceptions and expectations of dishonesty.” Workers will become dehumanized“(Parramore), it prevents them from experimenting and exercising the creativity on the job.” A woman from California filed a suit against her former employer because he forced her to to install a tracking app on her phone. She had to have it on her phone 24/7 or else she would
Don’t put it on the internet, although I guess some people would! “Don Tapscott can see the future coming ... and works to identify the new concepts we need to understand in a world transformed by the Internet.” (“Don Tapscott” Ted Conferences LLC) Tapscott is an Adjunct Professor of Management at the Rotman School of Management and the Inaugural Fellow at the Martin Prosperity Institute. In 2013, Tapscott was appointed Chancellor of Trent University. He has written extensively on the topic of information security in the digital age over the past fifteen years. In his essay entitled, “Should We Ditch the Idea of Privacy?”(Tapscott p.117). Tapscott considers a new, emerging theory
Like most countries and especially the United States their inhabitants enjoy a certain level of privacy. People don’t generally want intimate information to be accessible to the public eye. In fact many people go to great lengths to hide everything about themselves. What exactly is the definition of privacy? Well, privacy is the expectation that confidential personal information disclosed in a private place will not be disclosed to third parties, when that disclosure would cause either embarassment or emotional distress to a person of reasonable sensitivities. This information includes facts, images (ex: photographs and videotapes), and disparaging opinions. When over zealous law enforcement officials demand access to telephone conversations, e-mail or other electronic communication they are violating the unwritten code of privacy. When organizations from the private sector purchase intimate information about medical records either for commercial purposes, or to challenge your insurance eligibility or employment suitability. Unfortunatly this is a common practice in the United States and it is wrong.
Most studies have shown that popular opinion holds that without a doubt national DNA databases have proved useful in criminal investigations (Wallace, 2006, pS27). The concept of a national DNA database has raised concern about privacy and human rights as seen through the scope of public safety. All of these concerns are elevated with databases include convicted, arrestee, innocent, and “rehabilitated” offenders (Suter, 2010, p339). Robin Williams of University of Duham (2006) asserts that:
Scrolling through my Facebook feed on my iPhone, casually looking at my friend’s pictures statuses and updates, I came across a video with an amusing title. I tapped the play button expecting the video to load. Instead, I was redirected to an app asking permission to access my “public information, pictures and more.” I then realized; what I considered to be “private information” was not private anymore. Privacy is becoming slowly nonexistent, due to the invasion of advertising companies and the information we publicly post in the online world. In the essay “The Piracy of Privacy: Why Marketers Must Bare Our Souls” by Allen D. Kanner remarks, how major companies such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft get billions of transmissions each year on
In today’s society I believe that Americans truly enjoy the last piece of their privacy that they have left. There isn’t much left that is private these days. Everything or everyone is being monitored to a certain degree. Your moves on the internet are being followed, you might very well have your phone conversations listened into, and your grocery store purchases are also being recorded.
Print Lazar, Wendi S. “Limitations to Workplace Privacy: Electronic Investigations and Monitoring” Computer and Internet Lawyer (2012): SIRS. Web. The Web. The Web.
The evolution of the Internet started from the department of defense's project, and rapidly distributed to world wide. With the rise of the Internet age comes with the benefits and the concerns. Because of the easeness to communicate information and displaying data, the first amendment needs to be applied to this communication channel. How are we using and communicating information without offending and harm others? Since the evolution of the Internet, there has been acts from Congress to regulate the use the Internet such as the Communications Decency Act in 1996 and the Child Online Protection Act in 1998. These acts aim to forbid Internet users from displaying offensive speech to users or exposing children of indecent materials. The Internet raises other issues that people might have. The biggest and most debatable topic is the privacy issue. Is the Internet a safe place to protect personal information such as financial information, medical data, etc…? Some people who are computer literate or at least with some experience in software and technology would not trust to release the information on the web or at random sites . As a matter of fact, any unknown or small vendor on the web would have difficulty getting many customers to do business online. Big vendors such as Amazon would want to secure their network infrastructure to protect the users information, so that their server would not be hacked. However, even this style of protecting personal information is not enough. The users demand further protection such as ensuring their information is not being sold to other vendors for misuse, or spam the users mailbox with soliticing.
Previously it took a lot of equipment to monitor a person's actions, but now with technology's development and advancement all it requires is a computer. And there are many mediums which can be monitored such as telephones, email, voice mail, and computers.4 People's rights are protected by many laws, but in private businesses there are few laws protecting an individual's rights. 5 As an employee of a company there is an understanding of the amount of monitoring the employer does. The employer has to decide how much monitoring is necessary to satisfy the company needs without damaging the company's employee morale.6 With all the monitoring done by private businesses they are free to violate employee privacy since the Constitution and the Bill of Rights a...
One type of surveillance is employee monitoring. Many employers monitor their workers’ activities for one reason or another. Companies monitor employees using many methods. They may use access panels that requires employees to identify themselves to control entry to various area in the building, allowing them to create a log of employee movements. They may also use software to monitor attendance and work hours. Additionally, many programs allows companies to monitor activities performed on work computers, inspect employee emails, log keystrokes, etc. An emerging methods of employee monitor also include social network and search engine monitoring. Employers can find out who their employees are associated with, as well as other potentially incriminating information. (Ciocchetti)
2) It is getting ever easier to record anything, or everything, that you see. This opens fascinating possibilities-and alarming ones.”
The privacy of the individual is the most important right. Without privacy, the democratic system that we know would not exist. Privacy is one of the fundamental values on which our country was founded. There are exceptions to privacy rights that are created by the need for defense and security.
You get to work, login, check your email, and examine the values of your stocks. Have you done something wrong? Should your manager care about what you do with those couple of minutes? Hypothetically, if you consider 48 working days per year, with 40 hours per weeks (totally 9,600 hours of work a year), then the daily five minutes of personal internet usage mounts to approximately 24 hours (three working days) of wasted company time. In a capitalist economy, such inefficiency impedes the goal to maximize profit; therefore, compelling businesses to turn to rigorous surveillance to discourage inappropriate use of company resources and to promote productivity. As the American legislative and judicial culture has generally upheld companies’ proprietary rights to monitor their employees at the expense of employees’ privacy, civil libertarians have protested to what they claim to be direct violation of the employees’ right to privacy, which the First, Third, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment implicitly guarantee.
Avoid the misuse of the company’s equipment and property for personal gain, or committing any sort of fraudulent acts that could damage the company name. As our employees are being given company equipment such as laptops and cell-phones, employees are prohibited to utilize those communication resources for any non-duty tasks. Employees are not to be using the access to the web for any online activities that are non-duty related such as social networking, streaming videos, or personal email messaging unless instructed to do so by the higher management who will assess the decision beforehand. The use of company cell-phones is strictly limited to company calls, or emergency calls to authorities, and every other use is strictly prohibited and could result in termination.
Privacy is the ability to maintain what or who can access and see your personal content and information. With that, the idea of privacy is different amongst different cultures and countries, while they all differ, they share common characteristics. The act of sharing ones own personal information is decision one must make on their own. Privacy is a right that all people should have and the government has the responsibility of maintaining that right. Data such as personal emails, bank details, medical records, and passwords need to remain safe and secure to ensure privacy is not invaded.