E-mail Surveillance on the Rise

A recent report by e-mail security specialist Pinpoint has found 63% of companies with 1000 or more employees either employ or are planning to employ staff to review company e-mail. The filtering policy, intended to ensure that corporate secrets or confidential financial information doesn't fall into the wrong hands, raises some privacy concerns for employees. The spread of information technology generally, like specific applications such as global-positioning satellites that reveal the location of an employee's cell phone, has increasingly enabled an employer to keep close watch on its staff. According to information gathered by the American Management Association (AMA), 51% of employers monitor the numbers called and time spent on phone calls by their employees, and 55% retain and review e-mail messages. One in four companies polled had fired an employee in the past year for a breach of e-mail policy. For more information, see a recent news report: http://news.com.com/2100-1022_3-5738134.html For the results of the AMA survey in 2005, see: http://www.amanet.org/research/ and choose the "2005 Electronic Monitoring & Surveillance Survey". For a previous news item in e-tips® relating to employee surveillance in Canada ("Application to Enforce Privacy Commissioners' Finding on Video Surveillance Dismissed by the Federal Court of Canada", Vol 3 No 1, June 23, 2004), see: http://dww.local/newsletter/jun23_04.htm#_Application_to_Enforce_Privac… Summary by: Nyall Engfield