Introduction

There has been much discussion over the last few years about the impact of the widespread use of computers on people s privacy. The rapid growth of the Internet as a tool of trade, research, and entertainment has only served to intensify that discussion. Much of the discussion of privacy on the Internet has focused on legal concepts of what the right to privacy might entail, and thus deals primarily with the issue of what legal protection users of the Internet (particularly American users) might be entitled to.

Such an approach seems to be somewhat wrong-headed, and so in this chapter I want to look at this problem in a different way. I hope to achieve three main aims: (1) to highlight the problems involved in discussing an essentially philosophical question within a legal framework, and thus to show that providing purely legal answers to an ethical question is an inadequate approach to the problem of privacy on the Internet; (2) to discuss what privacy in the medium of the Internet actually is; and finally (3) to attempt to apply a globally acceptable ethical approach to the problem of privacy on the Internet, and thus to answer the question of what is and is not morally permissible in this area. The problem of privacy on the Internet is obviously a very widespread and general problem; much of this chapter is somewhat general in content. However, I will focus this discussion on the issues of employer monitoring of e-mail and Web usage, to attempt to determine if such practices are justified or if they are rather an unjustified and unethical infringement on the privacy of employees .