Employee Privacy Report Paper

Employee Privacy Report Paper

Employee Privacy Report Paper

In May of 2003, I was shocked to find out that a very close friend had been fired from his corporate job for misuse of his companies’ computer. Although I was somewhat aware of ethical expectations regarding use of the computer in the workplace, I had never heard of anyone losing their job behind it. My friend was a good man by all accounts, but to hear him describe how he had been previously disciplined and then terminated as a result of a company IT audit of his computer was unbelievable to me at that time. I asked him, “Can they do that”? As I thought about these events, I wondered what was going on at his place of employment, because here I was in a company in which everyone has a computer or at least access to one and the company has expressed very little about policies governing our use of computers. I have witnessed staff playing online games, solitaire, and visiting many non-work related web sites during normal work hours. I sometimes questioned whether it was appropriate and sometimes addressed my own staff on these practices, but there was no policy in place that formally addressed this matter. In August of that same year, a new directive was issued to all contractors by the government agency that over sees our organization governing the use of company computers and several other electronic devices.
Since the mid 1990s, employee monitoring and surveillance has been steadily on the rise. In 1997, 67% of organizations reported using some form of employee monitoring, compared to 76% in 2005 according to an (AMA) American Management Association Survey. Software manufacturers have anticipated increased sales of computer monitoring and surveillance software to businesses each year since more and more organizations have expressed a need to know what their employees are doing on company time. Why are employers monitoring their employees? In 1986, congress passed The Electronic Communication Privacy Act (ECPA), which gave...