Your company supplied you a laptop you can use at home. Say you use it to watch movies on Netflix. Should your company be allowed to track which movies you viewed? Maybe you do much of your work on a company-provided iPad. Should your company be able to track the Facebook posts you are making on it during your off-hours?
The monitoring debate
Thomas Claburn, editor-at-large for InformationWeek, isn’t so sure. As he writes in a recent online feature story, employees of any organization – whether a public university or a private company – shouldn’t expect privacy today. And they really shouldn’t expect this if they work on computers or use e-mail accounts provided by their employers.
Different levels
That’s because today’s technology allows employers to monitor everything from where their employees are throughout the day – thanks to smart phones and GPS – to what Web sites they’re visiting to what e-mail messages they’re sending. Employers implement this for a variety of reasons; they don’t want their employees to embarrass them on social media sites. They would like to make sure that their employees aren’t visiting TMZ during working hours. The question is: Will this monitoring pay off for companies?
The end of privacy?
The opinions by the experts quoted by Claburn are a mixed bag. These experts say that some monitoring of employees is reasonable, but other tactics are not. For example, employers shouldn’t monitor their workers’ locations when these workers are off duty. Perhaps the best advice in the story? Those companies who trust their employees tend to be rewarded with workers who are harder-working and more loyal.