The Ethics of Workplace Surveillance

The Ethics of Workplace Surveillance

You get to work, login, check your email, and examine the values of your stocks. Have you done something wrong? Should your manager care about what you do with those couple of minutes? Hypothetically, if you consider 48 working days per year, with 40 hours per weeks (totally 9,600 hours of work a year), then the daily five minutes of personal internet usage mounts to approximately 24 hours (three working days) of wasted company time. In a capitalist economy, such inefficiency impedes the goal to maximize profit; therefore, compelling businesses to turn to rigorous surveillance to discourage inappropriate use of company resources and to promote productivity. As the American legislative and judicial culture has generally upheld companies’ proprietary rights to monitor their employees at the expense of employees’ privacy, civil libertarians have protested to what they claim to be direct violation of the employees’ right to privacy, which the First, Third, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment implicitly guarantee.

Civil libertarians celebrated a small victory on September 2001, when a federal appeals court judge, Alex Kozinski, ordered the administrative office to withdraw software tracking the online activities of all employees in his Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Because the recent September 11 terrorist attacks heightened national security paranoia, bureaucrats in the court’s administrative office proposed a surveillance policy entailing unrestricted administrative review of emails and Internet use of all 30,000 federal court employees, including judges. The panel of judges decided that the policy unreasonably assumed that employees had no expectation of priva...

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