December 2004 |IEEE Spectrum | NA 57
BIG BROTHER AT WORK
New surveillance tools and a lack of regulation
give employers the upper hand BY DAVID KUSHNER
It can happen innocently enough. You
open your e-mail. There’s a message from
a co-worker down the hall. You double-
click to find an off-color joke, along with
a randy JPEG.
These days, employees who swap racy
e-mails might get something worse than
bad jokes; they could get the boot. At sev-
eral companies, including the New York
Times Co., Xerox, and Dow Chemical,
workers have been fired for allegedly send-
ing or storing pornographic images on of-
fice networks. And while employers have
been eavesdropping on their workers’
phone calls for some time now, newer
technologies are allowing employers to
keep tabs on workers as never before.
These tactics range from radio fre-
quency identification (RFID) tags to
Global Positioning System (GPS) chips
embedded in cellphones and company
cars. Even video surveillance is being re-
born, with searchable digital systems that
can run over a network. According to the
American Management Association in
New York City, nearly 80 percent of U.S.
companies now engage in some form of
workplace monitoring, up from 15 percent
of companies in 1997.
To be sure, employers have their reasons
for watching. After all, a disgruntled
employee can make off with many
megabytes’ worth of company secrets on a
thumb-size drive. Managers may worry that
productivity could slip if workers spend too
much time surfing eBay. But employers can
go too far, says Frederick S. Lane, author of
The Naked Employee: How Technology Is
Compromising Workplace Privacy. “The
problem is that this technology gives
employers access to so much information
that they really get to call all the shots.”
ONE BIG REASON employers are snooping
more is that they can: there are few laws
protecting privacy at work, particularly
in the United States. While there are
certain standards for privacy in one’s
own home, those rights generally don’t
extend to the workplace. Some countries,
such as Germany and Australia, are be-
ginning to address workplace snooping,
but in the United States “these laws are
still in the Dark Ages,” says Lewis
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