Employee and Technology Privacy: Is the Boss Spying - Essay Example

Despite the fact, that employees are concerned about their privacy, employers, on the other hand, value about workers’ productivity and efficiency. Most employees spend long hours visiting social, music and pornographic websites, which can lead to employer’s network jamming, or an atmosphere of harassment (Jennings, 2008). In order to avoid surfing websites, which are unrelated to organization’s business activities, employers have the right to block all the sites which are unrelated to the job so that their employees cannot access them during work.

Employees should, therefore, not use the internet for personal items during work. The use of internet for personal activities during work cannot save employees money and time in any way. Therefore, a proper working schedule, which gives employees enough time to run their personal errands outside the work place, should be made available for employees. This will give them enough time to do activities such as shopping, and stop using the internet at work for unrelated activities (Jennings, 2008).

Question #2 The problem to be investigated here is to determine the difference between using secret or electronic monitoring, and employer’s decision to, without notice walk around an office to observe behavior and work. Some of the reasons why managers keep secret eyes on employees include liability for harm to customers, internal theft, the need to ensure excellent customer care services, and driving records. All managers are charged with the duty of gathering their employees’ data on wrongdoing and performance (Jennings, 2008).

Monitoring employees and gathering their personal information are usually difficult tasks for employers. This is because they have to report at work on a daily basis, and spend the whole day walking around offices while observing behavior and work. This activity is at times cumbersome, which in turn lowers employer’s efficiency and productivity. However, electronic monitoring has significantly improved employer’s efficiency, since they are capable of working anywhere even at home, and at any time (Jennings, 2008).

This does not interfere with their programs, since with the internet, and monitoring devices, they are capable of following up their employees’ without much difficulty. Monitoring devices allows employers to track down everything their employees do at work, and also makes employees do their much easier (Jennings, 2008). Question #3 The problem to be investigated is whether or not privacy protection applies in the case of law enforcement and warrants for emails. Most companies are currently working to develop technology, which can eliminate e-mail messages from their hard drives, in response to employees’ complaints about their e-mail being monitored, and uses of e-mail by employees, as well as resulting espionage via e-mail (Jennings, 2008).

With the new technology, it will be possible to delete sent e-mails permanently, immediately they are sent. This will indeed protect employees’ privacy efficiently. However, permanent deletion of e-mail poses a threat on law enforcement since once the messages are sent they cannot be traced and retrieved. In addition, law enforcement officials usually rely on e-mail messages to reconstruct crimes (Jennings, 2008). Therefore, privacy protections that permanently delete messages from