The Future of Workplace Privacy

Above the door of the federal government's newly established "Information Awareness Office" is the motto Scientia est potentia—"Knowledge is power." That's a disturbing attitude on the part of the federal government, but at least there's some safety in numbers: With more than 300 million people in the United States, the odds of any individual coming under random surveillance is relatively small. The odds are considerably higher in most businesses, only a few of which are so large as to number in the tens of thousands.

If knowledge is power, the ability of employers to increase their power over their employees is only going to increase. It does not take a call to phone psychic Miss Cleo to safely predict that surveillance technology will get steadily smaller, cheaper, and more powerful. As the cost of surveillance technology continues to drop, the unavoidable consequence will be that an increasing percentage of Americans will spend significant portions of each day being monitored by their employers. While much of that surveillance will continue to be open, the percentage of secret surveillance will steadily grow, if only because the tools themselves will make it easier to conduct hidden surveillance.

In theory, market forces could limit employer surveillance: If enough employees chose not to work for companies that conduct the more outrageous types of surveillance, eventually those companies either would be unable to function or would change their surveillance practices. Unfortunately, technology often moves faster than the slow tides of market forces. The implementation of most surveillance technologies is so widespread (due in large part to the consistently rapid drops in cost) that it is difficult for individuals to discriminate between different businesses based on their surveillance practices. In addition, market forces are predicated on the theory that individuals have access to all of the necessary information before they make their decision. To the extent that a significant portion of employee surveillance is secret, it's information that's unavailable to the average employee.

The issue of workplace surveillance most directly affects the nation's roughly 140 million employees, but it has important implications for all of us. Either we successfully establish boundaries to protect some privacy in the workplace and pull back the curtain cloaking hidden surveillance, or we run the risks associated with the unmonitored collection and potential misuse of highly personal information. This is precisely the type of broad social issue, like child labor or civil rights, that Congress can and should address.