Guarding Against Employer Monitoring

Although we have presented employee monitoring as a fait accompli , there are things that employees can do to guard themselves against being routinely monitored. The first and most fundamental thing an employee can do to avoid being frequently monitored is to refrain from those activities that are prime candidates for monitoring. Never use company equipment for illegal and unauthorized activities. This is important because, if employees keep within the law, they limit employer power to monitor them. Remember, however, that employer-leaning courts have given employers absolute power over employees. To safeguard themselves in light of the above, employees should do the following (Wallace, 2001):

1. Check their computer s system folder for all unfamiliar changes in sizes. Changes in size may indicate extra programs or data that were created either remotely and deposited on the client or secretly recorded on the client (logged) and then stored.

2. Look for alterations in the Registry to be able to track changes of programs that should not be there. There is Registry editing software on the market that easily does this.

3. Check for odd file names that are hidden . Monitoring software many times uses hidden files. There are several software programs on the market that do this type of checking.

Even though it seems like the employer has a free hand in employee monitoring since technology and sometimes the courts have been more in favour of the employer, things seem to be changing. New technologies have started appearing on the horizon that are claiming to be able to protect a person from surveillance. Such software is called an Anonymizer . Anonymizers, like ZeroKnowledge, Freedom, and SafeWeb, protect their users from intrusive employers and marketers by strongly encrypting user data. For example, if an employee who uses an anonymizer visits a Web site, the employer will never be able to see this visit using monitoring software. The data passed to the employee host and all log files will be encrypted and will never show up. However, the employer may only see employee trips to the Web site that host the anonymizers (Schulman, 2001).