The internet offers individuals boundless opportunity to explore the world. The problem with this excessive freedom is when people take it out of their personal space and abuse this freedom in their place of work. In recent years there has been an upward trend of employee email and internet monitoring. This paper will explore the effects of internet monitoring in the job place as well as my own personal work situation.
My current employer is a small business. Because of the proximity of everyone in the office, there is not a real need to monitor computer activities. There is little way that someone could play on Facebook without the entire office knowing. However, our policy is still to limit person internet use, such as email to our break periods. In the past, I worked for the state at a university. The rules for internet use there were much more stringent. We signed a release when work started that said that anything we look out could be monitored and kept on file by our technical department. In that situation, we had no privacy rights as employees. Even on our breaks, we were forced to step out of the office, instead of given access to check our email. That did not necessarily create a more efficient environment as it made work more of a chore and increased the use of phones for texting in the office. Besides that, people still forwarded jokes or personal info via their work computers instead of their personal accounts.
The only major laws regarding an employee's privacy, is that the business must disclose to their workers that they are being monitored and the extent of the monitoring. Failure to do so will result in a number of costly lawsuits for the business. Nonetheless, employers continue to monitor employee net activity as they believe it keeps their employees on track and away from cyber loafing. More than anything this practice is a fear tactic justified by keeping the businesses safety and pr
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