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Company surveillance of office workers' e-mail is rising
By: Matthew Brelis
The personal computer is an indispensable tool in the workplace. But don't be fooled: It may be personal, but it's not private. Ronald Thiemann thought it was. We now find out his resignation in November as dean of Harvard Divinity School was prompted by university techies' discovery of pornography on the Harvard-issued PC in his Harvard-owned home.
Twenty-eight employees of the St. Louis-based Edward Jones & Co. brokerage thought their PCs were private -- before they were disciplined last month for sending e-mail that contained either pornography or dirty jokes. Another 19 employees at Edward Jones -- ranked the 11th best company in America to work for earlier this year by Fortune magazine -- were dismissed on April 29.
The company, with 17,000 employees worldwide, has been inundated with requests from other businesses for information on its electronic usage policies and what types of programs were used to uncover the offending employees. Politicians focus on protecting privacy rights on the Internet -- ensuring, for example, that no one steals your credit card number when you shop at amazon.com. But the real advance in cyber-surveillance is in the workplace. "There are spying eyes everywhere, but by far the person most likely to be spying on you is your boss," says Lewis Maltby, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's workplace rights office.
Twenty-seven percent of businesses surveyed by the American Management Association said they review employee e-mail, up from 20 percent in the 1998 survey. What employees may find especially discomfiting is this: The majority of e-mail "screens" are done without any provocation by the worker, such as a complaint to management. They are totally random. And bosses are perfectly free to check up on employees' online activities. "The general rule with respect to the computer that sits in front of you at work is there are no rules," says L. Camille Hebert, author of "Employee Privacy Law" and associate dean of the Ohio State University College of Law.
Maltby is blunter: "Employers can do whatever they want. The only statute that is even remotely applicable is the wiretapping laws, and that only applies to the spoken word. So your boss might have some trouble listening to your telephone calls at work, but an employer can freely read your e-mail, when the same message would been a violation if it was a telephone conversation."
Surveillance doesn't stop with e-mail. There are many computer programs that will monitor which Internet sites are being visited, and how long an employee stays there. For example, SurfWatch Software can either block access to sites or simply monitor what sites are being used. "Companies are looking at this type of solution more and more for three reasons," says Theresa Marcroft, director of marketing for the California company.
"One is productivity. If I am spending half my day buying books or planning a vacation, the boss is not getting the productivity he would like, he would expect, or he is paying for. Second, there is liability, with huge color monitors that show pictures of nudes, white supremacists, or anti-abortionists. That can create a hostile workplace environment. And thirdly, companies look at this to optimize their networks. If rich videos are being downloaded, the network is not as fast for people trying to get the job done."
But what about the worker who comes to work after having been to the doctor's and been told she has breast cancer? Or the employee who is coming to grips with being a survivor of incest? In both cases, it is probable that they would do some research on the Internet, and just as probable that they would not want anyone -- especially supervisors -- to know about it.
Policies on computer, Internet, and e-mail usage vary widely from company to company. Some prohibit any personal use, others are quite liberal. In most cases, the company's written policies indicate whether employees can be monitored. But the American Management Association survey found that in about 15 percent of the cases, employees were not informed that their computer, Internet or e-mail use could be monitored.
Courtesy: The Austin American-Statesman
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