Privacy and Internet Service Providers


There is one final range of issues that I wish to discuss regarding privacy and the role of Internet Service Providers (ISPs). An ISP has access to a great deal of private information about those for whom they provide Internet services. This is important in the context of employer monitoring of employee Web and e-mail usage, since many larger companies act as their own ISP and thus are in a position to legitimately acquire a great deal of information about the Web and e-mail use of company employees, without being required to actually monitor those employees. This is because the customers of an ISP (who, in the case of a large company that acts as its own ISP, are employees of the company) freely share a great deal of information with their ISP.

Consider what happens when an e-mail message is sent from one person to another. Effectively what happens, is that the sender of the e-mail asks their ISP to deliver that e-mail to a particular e-mail address. Even though the content of the message is private, the address to which the message is being sent cannot be private, for if it was, the ISP would be unable to deliver the message. There are obvious real world parallel examples of this phenomenon : the content of a letter sent through the postal system may be private, but the address to which the letter is sent (and the return address, if any) is not private, for this information is being shared with the postal company. Similarly, while the content of a telephone conversation may be private, the number dialed is not private, for the person making the telephone call is sharing this information with the telephone company; when they dial the number, they are, in effect, asking the telephone company to establish a connection between those two telephones. While the processes may be automated in some (or all) of the examples I have given, the fact nevertheless remains that the information regarding the addressee or telephone number dialed is shared information.

In a similar way, when people call up particular Web sites on their Web browser, what they are actually doing is requesting their ISP to deliver this data; so once again there is a process of shared information. The content of material exchanged through a Web connection may be private, but the Web addresses visited by the computer user are not. Thus, in cases where a company is acting as its own ISP, the company employees, when using e-mail or browsing the World Wide Web, are sharing with the company the details of the Web sites that they visit and the e-mail addresses to which they send messages. In such cases, the company would not need to monitor employees e-mail and Web usage in order to find out this information.

This seems to lead to a rather problematic conclusion: those employers who act as their own ISP can legitimately monitor certain aspects of their employees Web and e-mail usage, but other employers who use external ISPs cannot. However, I think that there is a solution to this problem, and it comes from Nissenbaum s (1998) concept of contextual integrity. When employees send e- mails and request Web pages through their company ISP, they are sharing this information in a particular context and for a particular purpose. If this information was to be used in another context or for another purpose without the consent of the employee, then this would violate contextual integrity and would thus infringe upon the right to privacy of the employee. This can only be justified in cases where it would be justifiable to infringe upon privacy in other ways; that is, when a good end is being aimed at, when infringement of privacy is necessary, and when the good achieved by the infringement of privacy is proportional to the harm caused by the infringement.




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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