Chapter 1: It s My Property and I ll Spy If I Want To...

Overview

It is fairly safe to say that virtually everyone in this country is physically naked at some point during the typical day. For most of us, it's usually in the morning, as we rush to change, bathe, or shower in order to get ready for the remainder of the day. Naturism is neither a practical nor an accepted choice for most of us, and so we dress according to our day's plans. A day spent puttering around the house may merit nothing more than a pair of sweat pants and a tattered t-shirt. For a trip to the mall, we might choose a polo shirt and a reasonably clean pair of jeans. And for many of us, a day in the office still requires a company uniform, a coat and tie, or at the very least, a nice button-down shirt and khaki slacks.

The clothing choices we make (or feel required to make) mirror the way our society treats personal privacy. When we stand naked before the mirror in the morning, our cloak of personal privacy is wrapped most tightly around us, and it takes extraordinary circumstances to strip it away. From the moment we cross our property line onto public property, however, the cloak of personal privacy begins to flap and flutter, and offers us only sporadic protection. And once we cross the line onto someone else's property, particularly as an employee, our cloak is at its thinnest and most revealing.

As we'll see in this chapter, there are a number of reasons—some of them quite compelling—for surveillance of employees. A major problem, however, is that technology makes it possible for employers to gather enormous amounts of data about employees, often far beyond what is necessary to satisfy safety or productivity concerns. And the trends that drive technology—faster, smaller, cheaper—make it possible for larger and larger numbers of employers to gather ever-greater amounts of personal data.

To date, the nation's legislatures and courts have made occasional efforts to reweave some threads of the privacy cloak for employees, but the result is little more than a patchwork of protection. A legitimate debate can be had over whether there should be any expectation of "workplace privacy," but the real issue is that without some limits on the surveillance of employees, our more closely guarded privacy in the home will vanish as well.