Privacy In The Workplace Essay

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Mr. Janssen, as you know we are working on a comprehensive media use policy for JansCo. I’ve done some preliminary research on the topic of privacy in the workplace, and I’ve summarized what I’ve learned below.

Privacy in the workplace has always been an issue, but now with the introduction of computers in the workplace the ability to collect data on employees has increased significantly. If an employer wanted to, every action by every employee could be collected and analyzed. This type of monitoring isn’t acceptable however, but there are some guidelines that can be followed to define what is acceptable. First we can break privacy into two main categories. Informational privacy, and physical privacy.

Informational privacy itself can be broken down farther, into three subcategories. The first being sensitive information. This is information about an employee that is clearly personal, including things such as family life, health status, and religious and political beliefs. This information is off limits to employers. Collecting data of that natural could jeopardize the professional relationships of employees. Their relationships should be defined based off of their work, and what they choose to share. The second category is information that is normally private, but wouldn’t tarnish a relationship if exposed. This is where it’s hard to draw the line. It’s easy for employers to gain more from the employee than they should in this category, because the employee has little defense if the employer makes a claim to that information. Between employees however this information is normally considered to be private by respect. In what is called “civic inattention”, co-workers are expected to ignore potentially sensitive conversations if o...

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...rk. This can prevent copyright infringement lawsuits, which have been targeting businesses recently because of their deep wallets. In some court cases e-mail or internet activity records of employees may be required, and the business can be punished if they’re unable to present the court with the requested records. In that scenario not having CMS can have serious consequences. Since the employer owns and provides the internet and e-mail services to the employee, they have the right to install whatever monitoring software they want to. In the case Smyth v. Pillsbury Co., it was decided that employees have no reasonable expectation to privacy at work (Eivazi, 2011)

As you can see, there are a lot of issues related to computer privacy in the workplace. I will continue researching the topic and present a full report with recommendations to your by the end of the month.

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