[ Sajith M ]

Internet access monitoring and filtering is a growing industry with an annual growth of 36% and the biggest consumers are not parents who don’t want their children to access inappropriate material, rather its corporations that do not trust their employers and want to monitor or filter the content that they access.

Let’s start with the usual arguments in favor of this monitoring

1. Assists in making the work environment free from hostile and harassing activity. This improved work environment lowers the exposure to employee lawsuits as monitoring assists in creating a safe and secure working environment.
2. Employees maintain efficient and productive work habits. These improved work habits would boost efficiency, increase productivity and improve customer service.
3. Employees avoid misuse of the employer’s equipment and resources. This misuse could clog up network bandwidth and computer disk space.
4. Employees accessing various inadvertently download Trojans and viruses onto their machines making it a security threat.
5. Sensitive information about trade secrets, intellectual property, customers, employees, and financial data is properly protected.

Well, so say those who want to implement these measures or the companies that develop the software to enable this. But do they actually stand up to scrutiny. Here are some facts:

1. Contrary to popular perception, monitoring may actually increase a company’s potential liability. Employers aren’t liable for harassment unless they are made aware that harassment is occurring. But if a company monitors employees, business assumes responsibility for everything it sees and everything it monitors on the Internet, whether an employee brings it to the company’s attention or not and then suddenly have a duty to investigate everything.
2. Loss of respect and trust for employer resulting in higher turnover, loss of productivity and decay of a positive work culture. Workplaces that are subject to high surveillance typically are culturally in trouble where trust is missing.
3. People are paid to do a job, and so long as the job is done within the specified parameters, they should be allowed some personal freedoms at work. And anyway, monitoring costs the company more than it saves.
4. While it is true that potentially sites that could infect the machines be blocked, rarely if ever is this the case. Also more often than not a good anti-virus solution will prevent these anyway.
5. Sensitive information about trade secrets, intellectual property, customers, employees, and financial data need not always be lost by visiting a site or sending an email, they can as well be lost by a face-to-face conversation, or a letter written on paper, or a telephone call, or an employee resigning and joining another company.

At the end of the day, all that such measure do is:

1. Invades worker privacy
2. Increases employee stress
3. Undermines employee trust
4. Reduces individual autonomy
5. Focuses on quantity rather than quality of work
6. Reduces employee morale and overall productivity

Philosophically and morally, employees are first and foremost people who are autonomous moral agents, where their moral status is defined by a set of rights. These rights include the right not to be used by others solely for the purpose of personal or organizational enrichment … They are entitled to respect, which implies some right to privacy

Michael J. Meyer, SCU Professor of Philosophy

Posted under: Thoughts/Censorship