Workplace Surveillance: Is it Ethical for employer to monitor their employee's communication via Internet?

Introduction

Nowadays, more and more employers are watching what their employees do with the computers provided for them to utilize their everyday jobs. The bosses want to know whether their staffs are abusing the trust given to them or not. With the help of affordable monitoring software, they can keep a close tab with the people they employ straightforwardly. Modern technologies are providing unprecedented opportunities surveillance.

Not only they can monitor the e-mails sent and received by their employees effortlessly but also review the content of them. Same goes with reviewing the Internet usage and files stored in the computers. Employers can track down what kind of sites their employees actually visit during the working hours using Internet Monitoring Software.

Some employees sometimes sneak in some online shopping sites or sneak over an e-mail joke using the company's resources at the time when they are supposed to attempt their jobs.

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This is the main reason why employers want to keep an eye on what the staffs are doing all through their working hours. They want to make sure that the employees are not wasting the company's time and money by doing something irrelevant to their responsibilities. The employees because there are many sexual harassment cases happen in the workplace involving the usage of e-mails, which later on can put the company in trouble if the case goes to the court.

Other forms of workplace surveillance are recording of computer keystrokes to measure the employee's work efficiency (this method is mainly used for monitoring data entry clerk), eavesdropping employee's telephone conversation, video recording of job performance, etc

To the employer, being able to monitor ensures that employees are doing their job and doing them well. But at the same time, such monitoring is decried by many employees as an invasion of...