The Perils of Privacy

A marketing manager forwards an e-mail joke containing a racial slur to a group of coworkers. But before the message can reach anyone, monitoring software scoops it up and ships it to the manager's supervisor, garnering the sender a reprimand and potentially saving the company from a costly and embarrassing lawsuit.

Down the hall in the billing department, a clerk uses a lunch break to scan the Web for information on abuse victims. The information retrieved also flashes onto a screen in the boss's office, revealing a secret the employee never told anyone.

Do you think your boss isn't reading your e-mail, counting the seconds you're away from your computer, patrolling the sites you're visiting on the Web, or even counting the number of keystrokes you make per day? Maybe not today, but they might be tomorrow. Personal-use issues are coming to a head as companies struggle to find effective ways of balancing employee freedoms and corporate protection.

Industry watchers say the government, through the arm of the courts, is delivering a stern warning to American businesses: A company is liable for most wrongs that its employees commit using computers, e-mail, or browsers on the job. If a company wants to ward off that kind of liability, it had better set up a business-only policy and make sure its employees understand it and adhere to it.

"An employee should have no expectation of privacy rights in the workplace," says Kerry Stackpole, president and chief executive officer of the Electronic Messaging Association, a nonprofit group in Arlington, Virginia, that represents business-oriented e-mail users. "That's not what the workplace is all about. Employers own the system and the PCs or the laptops. There's very little that protects employees from the eyes of employers."

Human Nature

Workers generally spend their days working. But in the span of an 8- to 12-hour workday, they might get an e-mail from a college buddy across the country or a sweetheart down the block. They might scan the Web for a quick read of their horoscope or the score of last night's hockey game. It's the lure of instant information at our fingertips.

"I think it's very hard in the modern world to segregate people's personal lives outside of the workday, particularly when workdays have gotten to be so long," says Joe Grabarz, executive director of the Connecticut Civil Liberties Union in Hartford. "The human condition prevents us from so neatly excluding our private lives from 8 in the morning to 8 at night. People simply function as full human beings."

And a good percentage of companies have been running on the honor system.

"We basically treat people as adults and expect them to act like adults, and so far, so good," says Bob Frase, director of information systems at PACE International Union, an association of 320,000 paper and oil workers with headquarters in Nashville. "If people feel they're trusted, then attitude, morale, and performance are better."