Chapter 9: Breaching the Castle Walls


Overview

At the beginning of this book, we saw how the privacy rights that we enjoy today were an outgrowth of property ownership—"A man's home is his castle," and all that. When it comes to the government and private property, the walls still stand reasonably strong—the Supreme Court ruled last year, for instance, that law enforcement can't use infrared devices to look for the heat sources used by marijuana growers—but in the constant privacy battle between employees and employers, the moat has been drained and the walls are being scaled. [1]

Paradoxically, the tension arises in large part from the fact that in some ways, employees today have far more power and influence than they've ever had before. The Internet is a tremendous leveler: It gives employees access to virtually unlimited amounts of information, the ability to search for new jobs and opportunities, and the ability to exchange news and opinions with other like-minded individuals both inside and outside the workplace.

At the same time, the computer revolution has also given employees startling new capabilities to harm their employers. With a few keystrokes, an employee can effectively wipe out years of intellectual property; with a single Web posting, an employee can cause a company's stock to plummet. Logically enough, companies are reacting to the real or perceived threat by intensifying their surveillance efforts. The paradox, of course, is that the same technology that makes individuals so potentially powerful also allows employers to invade their privacy in previously unimaginable ways.

In addition, property interests are giving employers grounds on which to challenge how employees behave even when they're not on company property. Because corporate reputation and brand identity fall within the broad definition of "property rights," businesses are taking aggressive steps to make employees take down offending websites, stop posting critical messages on the World Wide Web, and discover the identities of employee critics despite the clear efforts of the employees to remain anonymous. If current legal trends continue, it's unclear that employees will be left with any safe harbors of privacy.

[1]Kyllo v. United States, _______U.S. ______(June 11, 2001).




The Naked Employee. How Technology Is Compromising Workplace Privacy
Naked Employee, The: How Technology Is Compromising Workplace Privacy
ISBN: 0814471498
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 93

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