aised questions of who may or should have access to some or all of the Internet. Again, the problem is amplified for employees who access controversial sites during working hours, because user monitoring technology available to management but not to line staff means that most employees do not necessarily have an expectation of privacy with respect to their Internet habits (Knowles, 2000). The fact that employees must provide their employers with their company user name and password says much about how easy it is for employers to electronically eavesdrop on an employee at their sole discretion.
Both public- and private-sector employers may have specific policies regulating telecommunications use by individual employees, and employees may be obliged to sign the policies to prove that the policies are understood (Shumaker, 2003). The thing to be understood is that--in all industries--employees can expect no privacy in the content of e-mail messages that they send and receive or Internet sites they visit. The absence of privacy with regard to personal tastes is only one aspect of this, since that same technology enables employers to very closely track the productivity of an employee at his or her workstatio
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