The U.S. Supreme Court earlier this month ruled that your employer has the right to monitor your text messages. That development falls in step with corporations increasingly monitoring employee’s phone calls, e-mails, instant messages and social network postings as USA TODAY reported in this cover story. George Orwell was prescient, albeit a few decades off. In this LastWatchdog guest post,Ã‚Â Elizabeth Charnock, CEO of evidence analytics firm Cataphora, points out that employer-monitoring is a time-honored practice.

By Elizabeth Charnock

Given what I do for a living Ã¢â‚¬â€œ conducting digital investigations of various types Ã¢â‚¬â€œ I hear quite a bit of concern these days over the demise of privacy. I have to admit that much of it baffles me.

Perhaps this is in part due to my fondness for old movies. I love the classics for many reasons, but one of them is that they present many aspects of then-contemporary life in a non-self-conscious way. As such, they provide a window into what has changed, what has stayed the same and what, to paraphrase the French, stays the same the more it changes.

For example, in the 1949 classic Ã¢â‚¬Å“A Letter to Three Wives,Ã¢â‚¬Â a young Kirk Douglas bemoans the corrupting influence of a new medium whose sole purpose is to influence the American public into believing that happiness can only be achieved through consumption. The medium in question? Radio.

Media change

The office mailroom is another staple of old movies. In the prehistoric days before email, interoffice mail circulated in manila envelopes with holes in them, secured by string. There were no cell phones in the Ã¢â‚¬Ëœ40s, hence the often used device of a character whispering into the phone, so their neighbors would be less likely to overhear them.

It is impossible to argue that privacy in the workplace has decreased since the days of the mailroom clerk. All that has really changed is the medium. While it could be said that lack of technology was behind that lack of privacy, it does not follow that more technology implies more privacy.

The truth is most people want privacy for Ã¢â‚¬Å“the good guys.Ã¢â‚¬Â They donÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t want privacy for terrorists, thieves, sexual predators and other Ã¢â‚¬Å“bad guys.Ã¢â‚¬Â Which leads us to an unfortunate problem: the only way to separate the good guys from the bad is to empirically observe them.

Why employers watch

Taking that to the workplace, studies show that a majority of American corporations have deployed systems to monitor employee communication. Two reasons are behind this trend:

1. Many types of Ã¢â‚¬Å“badÃ¢â‚¬Â employee behavior can backfire on the company in the form of lawsuits, fines and damage to its reputation. In a challenging economic climate, employers are increasingly anxious to avoid such self-inflicted problems.

2. History shows us that incidents of employee fraud rise significantly during down times and employees have greater financial stresses.

For many, there is a big difference between a computer program scanning their communications looking for evidence of specific bad acts, such as sexual harassment, leaking company trade secrets or distribution of child pornography, and a human randomly reading emails and IMs. In the former situation, if you arenÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t doing anything wrong, it is a non-event; in the latter, all manner of embarrassing or awkward things can potentially be brought to light.

Additionally, there is a common misconception that equates such automated monitoring with employers snooping on their employees to see who is goofing off. Or just for the heck of it. The truth is that few employers have the inclination, time or money to do this. Indeed, most employees simply arenÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t interesting enough to merit it. And in the case of those few employees are, anyone looking for such information can satisfy their curiosity on Twitter or Facebook.

People say personal privacy has gone to hell because of these new social media sites. While I can see the point of this argument, I believe it too is misguided; I believe itÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s more of an issue of the scope and the type of audience. For example, today someone tweets they bought a great new pair of sandals; in the days before social media, you would have just worn the sandals where the whole town or company could see them. The audience and reach may have changed, but the act remains the same.

A duty to keep up

Organizations have a duty to ensure their systems are not being abused. Since most communications are now digital, so must be the monitoring that is essential to avoid problems that have the potential to cripple an organization.

That said, it is important to acknowledge that monitoring systems can collect private information that the employer does not need to know. This is a risk employees take when they entrust personal information to a system that is owned by someone else. The employer, however, should also ensure that any sensitive information Ã¢â‚¬â€œ whether it belongs to employer or employee Ã¢â‚¬â€œ is appropriately handled.

No matter how good technology is, technology alone is never the complete solution. Companies should create and enforce policies that make it clear to employees what their duties are, what the employerÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s obligations are and how they each affect the other. A little education can go a very long way to overcoming the distrust that arises when employers try a stealth approach to this very sensitive issue.

About the author: Elizabeth CharnockÃ‚Â has experience in engineering management, management consulting, and restart management at companies including Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems. Charnock holds a BS in Theoretical Mathematics from the University of Michigan Honors Program. SheÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s also the author of the upcoming book, e-Habits: What You Must Do to Optimize Your Professional Digital Presence, which will be available in August, 2010 from McGraw-Hill.

June 30th, 2010 | Guest Blog Post | Privacy | Top Stories