Big brother is watching - An examination into Corporate Spying

by John D. Moore, MS, CADC

Imagine sitting at your workstation one morning and composing an email to a friend, detailing the events of the night before. In your electronic correspondence, you reveal that you took a co-worker out on a date and engaged in sexual intercourse. After finishing the email, you click send and go on about your day. A few hours later, the Director of Human Resources calls you into her office and furnishes you a copy of the email you sent to your friend. Additionally, the HR Director warns you that if you ever send out another personal email on a company computer, you will be terminated. Does this sound extreme? Perhaps so, however for many people, incidents like these and others are all too common. In fact, corporate America is spying on its employees at increasing rate. In a 2000 study of 2, 133 companies conducted by the American Management Association, 73% of all respondents admitted that they electronically spied on their employees (DeTienne, 2002).

WHO IS SPYING & Why?

If you are employed in a white-collar job, chances are your employer is electronically monitoring you. Last year, the New York Times fired 23 workers for sending distasteful jokes through e-mail. The company said the firings were necessary to maintain a harassment-free workplace. At a subsidiary of Chevron Corp., offensive chain letters sent through e-mail were used as evidence in a successful sexual harassment suit in 1995 (Holland, 2002). Products like Content Technologies' MIMESweeper suite use lists of keywords and sophisticated grammatical rules to filter through corporate mail, searching for potential liabilities. If a word like breast appears, it sets off the software to pull the email for someone to read, such as a department manager or HR Director. The high prevalence of corporate spying commonly occurs in white-collar environments because this is the place where technology is most often used.

Methods of Spying

Electronic surveillance is not confined to email. Employers have the ability to monitor a myriad of electronic activities, including:

• Internet activity, including visited sites and duration of visit
• Search terms on Internet search engines (keywords).
• Telephone calls, including the actual content of the call (eavesdropping).
• Proprietary data access, including accounts visited and information obtained.
• Fax activity.

Why Employers Spy

Employers cite a variety of reasons for electronically monitoring their employees. What follows are commonly cited reasons for electronic surveillance by employers:

• To inoculate the company against illegal activity by employees.
• Assure worker productivity
• Prevention of sexual harassment
• Protection of company trade secrets

WHAT WORKERS CAN DO TO PROTECT THEMSELVES

Workers need to know that anything they do at work is subject to being monitored, primarily through electronic means. To protect one's self from reprimand or job loss at work, employees using electronic devices, including phones, faxes, emails and the web should:

• Restrict email usage to business purposes only.
• Restrict Internet activity to business purposes only.
• Avoid using the workplace telephone for personal reasons, even on lunch and break times.
• Use fax machines for business purposes only.
• If an employee simply must send out a personal email, she or he should use private, web based email such as Yahoo or Hotmail.

CONCLUSION

People employed in today's modern electronic environment need to understand that the employer can monitor all activities being conducted electronically. The courts have ruled in many cases that workers do not have an expectation of privacy in the workplace and that it is legal for the employer to monitor work activity. At technology advances, workers can expect an increase in monitoring activity in the workplace. Big brother is indeed watching and the means by which he can observe activity is expanding everyday.

About the Author

johndmoore.net
JOHN D. MOORE, MS, CADC is the author of Confusing Love With Obsession: When You Can't Stop Controlling Your Partner & the Relationship (Writer's Club Press), a book containing a variety of case histories regarding people who use controlling behaviors in personal relationships. Moore is a certified addictions counselor in the state of Illinois and a Professor of Health Sciences at American Public University.