Electronic Surveillance Of Employees Essay

Abstract.
The most common ways to keep track of employees is video surveillance, monitoring e-mails, keeping track of pages visited on the Internet and anything else that happens on computer, fixing the time of arrival and departure from work, listen to and record telephone conversations. Some of these methods are quite obvious for employees - for example, time-stamping, but some are hidden and may be disturbing to learn about. Business conduct surveillance not just to protect their employees and property, but to insure that procedures that are in place are being followed and to have a control over the business environment. That invasion of privacy can be justified by employer, but can also be an offense to employee.   This research is about Privacy Rights of Employees and what borders if any there are for Employers to conduct surveillance at workspace.

Privacy Where and How?
      It used to be specially trained doorman, who recorded the time for each incoming and outgoing employee and supervisor looking behind your shoulder, today the role of watchmen perform by electronic badges, which are equipped in the most offices. Camcorders most often are installed in reception areas, lobbies and corridors or cameras installed in working areas. Some of them are visible to the naked eye and some miniature cameras are built into an alarm system or fire smoke detector. If those cameras are installed they can be connected to a common surveillance system, and the recorded information can be viewed from any computer on network or the Internet. Viewing e-mail can be done by local network administrator in the company. It is unlikely that anyone will read all mail in full but installed filters for keywords and view only those messages that contain them.
      Employer can browse the files, record logs of visits to pages on the Internet; read correspondence, charts and record in general everything that was going on the monitor. All this is also done to prevent information...