Technological Growth And Increasing Vulnerability Of Organizational Privacy

* In today’s world of fast-developing technology, in which the click of mouse can dispense a plethora of information, privacy for job seekers and employees is a significant issue. One type of privacy issue in the workplace occurs when a company gathers or circulates private or personal information about employees or candidates for employment.

As indicated by some people, the privacy right ought to be extended to workplaces. In the meantime, other individuals feel that this extension would encompass an unnecessary incursion into the managing rights of the management. In a working environment, the right to privacy of employees is a primarily controversial legal topic. This is even more of a concern or of an issue during this age of increased dependence on electronic mail and computers to do business. Because of innovation technology, employers have been enabled to monitor working environment correspondence that happens by means of PCs, for example, messages and Internet utilization. A majority of the employees feel that such observing abuses their privacy rights. Nevertheless, the law does permit it. Some employee activities like private discussions and actual physical spaces at the workplace such as the locked desk drawers are under more privacy protections. Hence, there is a great need for the employers to consider circumstances under which he or she wants to conduct an investigation.

If a casual user of the internet were to Google a search for the word “privacy” as of June 2015, there would be close to 2 billion hits. Discussions of privacy, piracy and internet breaches are everywhere. The numerous Google hits show there is nearly universal agreement that (1) we have less privacy and more information than we used to, and (2) this is bad.Information itself is, of course, not bad, but as we have witnessed recently, even personnel record maintained by the United States government are subject to unethical hacking by all sorts of unscrupulous individuals and governments. Clearly, privacy is something that a great many people and businesses are concerned about. Whilenew information technologies (IT) have created the possibility of making lives easier or better, new IT has also created new conflicts with our existing business and personal norms, and laws and our traditional ethical principles. IT has even caused the creation of a new field“Information Systems Ethics” to cover these changes ( ).

Employer monitoring is often seen as an intrusion of privacy for many employees. Companies observe their people in various ways from online usage, social media and emails. Furthermore, organizations now have policies and procedures in place that outline how much accessibility they have to what their staff view and write on company time. The top reasons employers say they monitor is to keep the personnel safe, determine how work is being done and to deter disgruntled employees from giving away company secrets (Mello, 2012).

“Employee privacy has become a greater concern as more and more employees have turned to the Internet and other electronic media to communicate both on and off the job. ... Employers can generally search through anything that happens on company computers” (Employee

Technology allows employers to observe a lot of aspects of their staff place of working actions. While workers may feel that such observing is a violation of their confidentiality rights, many types of monitoring are permitted below the law. A preponderance of employers observe their workers. They are provoked by apprehension over proceedings and the rising role that electronic confirmation plays in lawsuits and government organization investigations.

An employee’s privacy rights in the workplace come down to the word ‘Reasonable’. The employee’s rights in the workplace are very different than it is in their personal lives. An employee cannot expect the workplace to be private, nor their electronic communications to be private as well. Within the workplace, employers have the right to reduce liabilities within the scope of the law to which they must adhere. For example, employers have the right to ensure that email communication is being used for work-related purposes (Gidin, 1999). Federal laws provide employers the right to monitor communications, retain records, and conduct surveillance given that they provide proper notification

Privacy has remained a concern in the world but there have been numerous cases regarding privacy in the workforce. Privacy among the work environment brings ethical dilemma of whether companies have the rights to monitor their employees email, computer and internet usage. When we think about workforce privacy, one worries about the email and internet information that is gathered from being monitored being used for good or bad with current issues regarding known companies’ employees and customer’s personal information being hacked.

Many employees are unaware that their employers can monitor what they do online and fire or discipline them based on the information. According to a recent report by the American Management Association, more than a quarter of employers have fired workers for misusing e-mail, and about a third have fired workers for misusing the Internet (Snell & Bohlander,

According to the survey of Internet Usage at Work, a quarter of workers spend an hour or more online at sites unrelated to their work, 22% said 30 minutes to an hour was distributed to entertainment. Nearly 10% promised they never did something not relevant to their jobs (Sharma & Jatinder, 2003). Thus, surveillance in workplace can monitor workers’ performance and reduce the waste of time. Furthermore, monitoring employee’s work has a positive effect on work distribution. Surveillance also can achieve the goal of fair work distribution and show how an employee’s performance is evaluated (Mason, Button, Lankshear, Coates, & Sharrock, 2002, cited in Watkins, Coopman, Hart, & Walker, 2007, p. 175). As a result of which, the employee’s enthusiasm is stimulated and the productivity of business will be significantly improved. The opponent argue that excessive monitoring, however, can do harm to employees, because privacy can be compromised if the disclosure of employees’ information was not authorized, and it may cause leak of private information (Ball, 2010). The significance of appropriately managing this issue recently drawn the public’s attention by the brutal cyberattack perpetrated against Sony information in late 2014. Sony employees’ private information was broadcasted to the third party (Ellis, 2014,

“The cyber security landscape has changed in the past couple of years – and not for the better” (Steen, 2013). Banks are faced with attacks to retrieve customer account information, the military battles with attempts to obtain secrets. These attacks are not just committed by induvial hackers but entire countries. Data privacy rules differ from country to country. For example, Fisher, 2014 states individual search engine access is restricted in different ways depending on the country. China along with other countries restrict access to politically sensitive information, while the United States protects the free flow of information (Gonzalez-Padron, 2014). With companies relying more on technology such as cloud computing and virtual storage their level of vulnerability rises. IT personnel have the difficult task of protecting company data, this is why it is vital to have an ethical compliance program in place protect the organization from internal and external threats.

With the rise of advanced technology, there arose the threat of surveillance and privacy invasion in the workplace. An employee, by the very nature of the employment relationship, must be subject to some level of monitoring by the employer. However, this monitoring has its limits. Rights of privacy primarily are related to organizational invasion of a person?s private life and unauthorized release of confidential information about a person in a way that would cause emotional harm or suffering (2). It is the

Employers are forced to balance internal controls, employee morale, and data security. In professional environments where employees have access to sensitive consumer information, the employer protect must protect against employee misuse while not appearing oppressive and creating negative morale. According to the search database at Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (2014), there have been 932,729,111 reported consumer data records intentionally breached by employees since 2005.

Workplace surveillance has become a controversial issue in the workplace environment. The technological surveillance has developed as a necessity, it doesn’t only help in monitoring what the workers’ do, but it also helps to know how they do it. The modern technological development may have helped the employers’ to have an aerial view of the workplace environment, but it has created a controversy between the employees’ and the employer about the employees’ right to privacy being violated. The employees’ believe the act of workplace surveillance to be hateful that violates their right to privacy and liberties. The surveillance at the workplace often effects workers mental health, productivity, future success in their work and their relationship with the employer, despite being a necessity for the employers’ to protect themselves against the liability, many employers’ in the process of achieving efficiency through surveillance mistakenly ruin their relationship with their employees. The workplace surveillance is helpful in improving the performance of workers or it is contributing towards degrading the performance of workers and their work relationships.

The best way that an employee should be monitored by their employer is to have a software program that oversees the computer use of all of the employees that is set by a companywide set of standards. These standards should have no access parameters such as sex sites, or unethical locations such as a web site that promoted Arian Nation or White Supremacy. Additionally, it is realistic to have a company investigate any irregularities that occur on their own company equipment and network. Furthermore new employees are regularly acquainted with the companies own computer network policies and rules. To that end, employees are commonly required to sign a training roster that outlines these specific computer regulations and it is normally placed in their employee file.