Employer As Little Brother

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Employer as Little Brother Introduction The term "Big Brother" is watching you refer to how the Federal Government can monitor your every move, if desired. From the amount you money you earn and how much you pay in taxes to who you are talking to and when on your telephone or cell phone. Now there is a new term beginning to common place, "Little Brother is watching you". This term refers to how an employer can monitor your actions on the job in an office environment due to the technology now available to the employer to monitor and read what you are doing on the company computer. And it is ironic that one such technology is a computer software program released in 1998 to monitor what the employee is doing on the company computer is actually called "LittleBrother". LittleBrother Created by the company "SurfControl", it uses a data base that has recorded over 45,000 internet web-sites that have been placed in the categories of productive, neutral or unproductive and has the capability to inform an employer if his/her employee's are working under those categories while on the job. This also includes the ability to read an employee's e-mails, sent and received, regardless of whether they have been deleted or not by the employee. And this is not a technological capability that companies are not seeking. As reported from a survey conducted by the Society of Human Resource Management in 1996. "36 percent of responding companies searched employee messages regularly and 70 percent said employers should reserve the right to do so.

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