This was the subject of an article recently published by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer entitled, “Boeing Bosses Spy on Workers”. The reality is that this is more common than you might think.

The Seattle P-I described the methods the firm uses to protect its volumes of highly sensitive intellectual property, employing redundant teams of internal investigators to ensure that the information does not fall into the wrong hands.

One such team, dubbed “enterprise” investigators, has permission to read the private e-mails of employees, follow them and collect video footage or photos of them. Investigators can also secretly watch employee computer screens in real time and reproduce every keystroke a worker makes, the Seattle P-I has learned.

So how far is too far, given that Boeing does disclose their ability to monitor activity each time an employee logs onto the internal network? Doug Klunder of the ACLU felt that reading private emails was “highly questionnable”, adding that -

“it’s a tricky area because there aren’t a lot of legal protections in Washington and in most states where we have employment-at-will. There are some privacy rights of employees, but they are limited relative to the employer.”

According to a 2006 Forbes article entitled “How to (Legally) Spy on Employees”, published after the now famous Hewlett-Packard board spying case, employers are way ahead of employees relative to monitoring. It quotes findings of an ePolicy Institute study which found that over 75% of employers monitor employee website connections, with 26% having fired workers for misuse.

Hopefully reading this blog won’t get you into too much trouble…

Let’s keep the conversation going.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 at 9:48 am and is filed under General Thoughts, Human Capital/Human Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.