Trends: Ethical Hazards of Cheap New Technology


Many problems in the ethics of technology arise because our ethical conventions take time to adapt to our technology. Workplace surveillance is a good example. Surveillance technology is new and cheap. Only recently have large numbers of employers been able to monitor so many employees using telephone, Internet, and video technology. Both features work against a good fit between a technology and our ethical standards. New technologies are unfamiliar; it is difficult to critically appraise or give consent to technologies one barely understands. Indeed, for rapidly developing technology, many will not even know that it exists. Cheap technology can be applied without pressing need or much reflection, leading to overuse ” both inefficient and unethical ” of surveillance technology in the workplace.

The tremendous growth of electronic monitoring intensifies the workplace surveillance situation. As more work includes an information element, the computerized tools of most workers expose them to surveillance. Indeed, in the cases of networked computers and e-mail, potential surveillance becomes the default; computer systems owners are expected to be able to track, use, and retrieve all, and especially contentious, items. This raises a dimension outside the manager/worker bargaining nexus ” third party expectations for the organization, which we cannot pursue in this chapter.

The technological alternatives are also changing. We might miss these if we focus exclusively on the workplace. When we first addressed these issues in the early 1990s, most employees at my university had only one e-mail account, provided by our employer (Danielson, 1993, 1996). Recently, an informal survey indicated that most of us had at least one other personal e-mail account. Similarly, for many, the workplace currently provides their only easy high-speed access to the Internet, so they use their workplace computer for personal projects. Inadvertently, their employers workplace surveillance will reveal personal interests and information. Indeed, this is difficult to avoid; Coombs first proposal addresses this problem. A complementary solution encourages cheap home and free library Internet access, which will let some of the privacy issues sort themselves out or be dealt with by professional librarians, respectively. A change in the same beneficial direction can be seen in the tendency of universities to provide connectivity for student owned computers instead of access to university owned computers. This reduces the need to sort out personal from work- related use of this equipment. Of course, issues such as system load and legal obligation remain , but they are simplified by moving from an owner to a carrier role. Given rapid technological change, our analysis stresses the ethical importance of education about technology. Educating users about surveillance technology is needed for both efficacy and ethical reasons. Consider efficacy first; one can only deter agents from doing what they know to be surveilled. Secret or misunderstood surveillance has no deterrence value. The importance of technological education for ethics is obvious in the case of consent. One who doesn t realize that deleted e- mails are recoverable has consented to use the e-mail system in a defective sense only. Less obvious is the case of power relations induced by surveillance, part of which can be seen as a function of difference between what the employer can do and what employees think they can do. Here we see the need for regular, explicit, and clear reminders of policy and surveillance as Coombs recommends. An intermediate case between pure efficacy and ethics is the employee s need to know what will be recorded and saved (i.e., become part of institutional memory) and what is private, temporary, and disposed of. For example, my job at a university requires processing confidential letters of recommendation. Part of this process is destroying these documents. For paper documents, this is straightforward. Technological mediation complicates discharging my ethical role obligation. Did the e-mail server or client save copies of the electronically attached recommendation? Did some surveillance system record this document?

Finally, while stressing education, we must note that, of course, a workplace is not a school. Educating employees is not the primary goal of most organizations. Indeed, we are reminded by our very first model that an effective mixed strategy requires keeping one s opponent in ignorance. However, the current model contextualizes this advice: better not to find oneself in conflict with one s employees and needing to deny them information. Nonetheless, we conclude that employees need to be educated about surveillance technology for reasons of efficiency and ethics. Similarly, our model suggests that minimal, transparent surveillance systems will more likely move the workplace to the cooperative equilibrium and reduce the time and effort lost with other kinds of surveillance that might invite countersurveillance measures.




Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace. Controversies and Solutions
Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace: Controversies and Solutions
ISBN: 1591404568
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 161

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