Employees have developed great concern over their privacy in the workplace because of evidence that companies are violating their privacy rights, whether by very public or surreptitious means. This research explores issue fronts and controversies that have emerged around the subject, with a view toward explaining aspects of workplace culture and possible directions of development.
For a number of years, organizations of all sizes have intruded on the privacy of would-be employees as a condition of employment. Checking veracity of rTsumTs, "background investigations" that include obtaining employee credit and criminal history, drug testing, lie detector tests, aptitude tests, psychological evaluations, medical exams--all may be conditions of both getting hired and holding a job (Shumaker, 2003).
The explosion of computer technology in the last decade of the 20th century multiplied the capacity of employers to intrude on employee privacy. There are obvious benefits in having a wealth of research and life-management resources available to anyone who can access the Internet. Those who have Internet access at their workplace can also by and large save the cost of a personal investment in a home-computer system if necessary. On the other hand, at a time when much personal information is stored online in data banks used by financial, commercial, and government institutions, the very availability of information puts individual privacy at risk. And at the workplace, where the individual worker's computer use may be subject to scrutiny, the privacy issue is amplified.
Investigators, marketers, officials, and unscrupulous persons may intrude on individual privacy with impunity and potentially threaten the individual's well-being as a result. Indeed, marketers are ubiquitous on the Internet. Meanwhile, the availability of socially controversial information on the Internet--from sexually obscene to hate-mongering political Web sites--has r...