Chapter 3: Identification: Your Name is Not Enough


Overview

Once you have been hired, you will find that your employer has taken steps to make sure that access to company property is limited to people who are supposed to be there. As we've seen, corporate espionage and theft are major problems for companies and limiting access to authorized personnel is the first step in minimizing potential loss.

The first—and still the best—employee identification method is the simplest: visual recognition of employees by the people who work with them. In smaller workplaces, this is a reasonably practical approach: Employees get to know each other and can easily identify strangers. The ease with which our brains perform this routine task is astonishing. The average person is able to recognize and recall the face and name of hundreds of different people.

Obviously, however, visual recognition has its limitations as a corporate security measure. It doesn't take long for a business to grow to a size where such an approach is simply impractical. If a business has more than one location, or if there is a lot of turnover, an employer cannot reasonably rely on the ability of employees to know all of their coworkers. As a result, businesses spend an enormous amount of money—approximately $314 million per year as of October 2001—on various types of sign-in technologies designed to distinguish between those people who should have access to company property and those who should be kept out. [1]

[1]Robert Lemos, "VeriSign Inks Deal for Smart Cards," ZDNet News (October, 10, 2001).




The Naked Employee. How Technology Is Compromising Workplace Privacy
Naked Employee, The: How Technology Is Compromising Workplace Privacy
ISBN: 0814471498
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 93

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