Sunday, Sep. 3, 2006 By KRISTINA DELL, LISA TAKEUCHI CULLEN
Time Magazine
When one of his employees phoned in sick last year, Scott McDonald, CEO of
Monument Security in Sacramento, Calif., decided to investigate. He had already
informed his staff of 400 security guards and patrol drivers that he was installing
Xora, a software program that tracks workers' whereabouts through GPS technology
on their company cell phones. A Web-based "geo-fence" around work territories
would alert the boss if workers strayed or even drove too fast. It also enabled him to
route workers more efficiently. So when McDonald logged on, the program told him
exactly where his worker was--and it wasn't in bed with the sniffles. "How come
you're eastbound on 80 heading to Reno right now if you're sick?" asked the boss.
There was a long silence--the sound of a job ending--followed by, "You got me."
For every employer who lets his staff know they're on watch, there are plenty who
snoop on the sly. A general manager at a computer outfit in the Northeast wondered
about a worker's drop-off in productivity. Using software called SurfControl, the
manager saw the man was spending an inordinate amount of time at an innocently
named website. It turned out to feature hard-core porn. The worker was conducting
market research for his escort service, a venture for which he soon had plenty of time
after he got canned. "I don't give a rat's rear what they do at home," says the manager,
who wishes to keep his and his company's name private. "But what they do at work is
all my business."
Learn that truth, and learn it well: what you do at work is the boss's business. Xora
and SurfControl are just some of the new technologies from a host of companies that
have sprung up in the past two years peddling products and services--software, GPS,
video and phone surveillance, even investigators--that let managers get to know you
really well. The worst mole sits right on your desk. Your computer can be rigged to
lock down work files, restrict Web searches and flag e-mailed jokes about the CEO's
wife.
"Virtually nothing you do at work on a computer can't be monitored," says Jeremy
Gruber, legal director of the National Workrights Institute, which advocates
workplace privacy. Nine out of 10 employers observe your electronic behavior,
according to the Center for Business Ethics at Bentley College. A study by the
American Management Association and the ePolicy Institute found 76% of employers
watch you surf the Web and 36% track content, keystrokes and time spent at the
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,1531312,00.html (1 of 3)9/24/2006 5:50:37 AM
TIME.com Print Page: TIME Magazine -- Snooping Bosses
keyboard. If that isn't creepy enough, 38% hire staff to sift through your e-mail. And
they act on that knowledge. A June survey by Forrester Research and Proofpoint
found that 32% of employers fired workers over the previous 12 months for violating
e-mail policies by sending content that posed legal, financial, regulatory or p.r. risks.
You might think the sheer volume of e-mail would mean you could get away with a
crack about the boss's Viagra use. But sophisticated software helps employers,
including Merrill Lynch and Boeing, nab folks who traffic in trade secrets or sexist
jokes. One called Palisade can recognize data in varying forms, like the content of
NFL playbooks, and block them from your Out box. SurfControl, MessageGate and
Workshare check work files and e-mail against a list of keywords, such as the CEO's
name, a company's products or four-letter words. Wall Street and law firms
sometimes block access at work to personal accounts like Google's Gmail.
You can't really blame companies for watching our Web habits, since 45% of us
admit that surfing is our favorite time waster, according to a joint survey by Salary.
com and AOL. A Northeast technology company found that several employees who
frequently complained of overwork spent all day on MySpace.com Informationtechnology
departments routinely receive automatic Web reports on what sites
employees visit; they tend to review them only if there's a red flag.
Computers aren't the only office snitches. Slightly more than half of employers
surveyed monitor how much time their employees spend on the phone, and even track
calls--up from 9% in 2001. Companies are required to inform every nonemployee that
they're listening in, which is why you hear, "This call is being monitored for quality
assurance." But there's no such protection for staff members. Bosses monitor calls
with programs like Nice Systems', which sends an alert if your voice reaches a certain
decibel level or you blurt out profane language or a competitor's name.
You might want to stay on your best behavior even off the clock. Programs like
Verified Person keep tabs on employees outside the office with ongoing background
checks. Got busted for DUI last week? The boss will find out. And what you do on
the Internet at home is no secret either. After Penelope Trunk won an award for
writing about sex online, her blushing employer asked her to start using a pseudonym.
At the travel sector of one corporation, a manager's spouse was surfing the Net and
found a photo album with the company's name on a picture-sharing site. The photos
documented a training session, after which co-workers progressed to inebriated
nakedness. Because a worker posted the pictures without consent, he was fired. "If
you'd be embarrassed that your mom saw it, don't post it," advises Kevin Kraham, a
law partner at Ford & Harrison.
Bloggers, be careful. Workers at Google, Delta Airlines and Microsoft have claimed
their blogs got them fired. But with more than 50 million blogs out there, employers
like Microsoft train new hires on blog etiquette. Curt Hopkins of Ashland, Ore., says
a public radio station cut short a job interview after the boss read his blog; he was
later hired by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival to "build buzz online." Trunk, who
now blogs about workplace issues on Brazen Careerist, says telling young workers
not to blog is like telling a baby boomer not to use the phone. "When major
corporations try too hard to block the electronic community," she says, "Generation Y
just leaves."
The Facebook set may not like it, but courts are mostly giving the O.K. to corporate
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,1531312,00.html (2 of 3)9/24/2006 5:50:37 AM
TIME.com Print Page: TIME Magazine -- Snooping Bosses
spying. "I haven't seen one case where an employee has won on a right-of-privacy
claim," says Anthony Oncidi, head of the labor and employment department at law
firm Proskauer Rose. Companies can ward off privacy claims if they have informed
staff members they're being monitored, even if only in a single sentence in a rarely
read handbook. Even when there is no advance notice, workplace-privacy claims have
proved hard to win. Only two states (Connecticut and Delaware) require bosses to tell
workers they're being monitored, but even in those places, there aren't restrictions on
spying.
Businesses argue that their snooping is justified. Not only are they trying to guard
trade secrets and intellectual property, but they also must ensure that workers comply
with government regulations, such as keeping medical records and credit-card
numbers private. And companies are liable for allowing a hostile work environment--
say, one filled with porn-filled computer screens--that may lead to lawsuits. "People
write very loosely with their e-mails, but they can unintentionally reach thousands,
like posters throughout a work site," says Charles Spearman of diversity-management
consultants Tucker Spearman & Associates. "In an investigation, that e-mail can be
one of the most persuasive pieces of evidence." In fact, a ruling in New Jersey last
year found an employer had a duty to investigate an employee's viewing of child
pornography and report it to the police.
The monitoring trend could get even more Orwellian. In Thompson v. Johnson
County Community College in Oklahoma, the court held that employees had no
expectation of privacy in a locker room because the room had pipes that required
occasional maintenance. (The need to service the pipes was enough for the court to let
the employer use video surveillance.) The wave of the future seems to be radiofrequency
identification, a transmitter smaller than a dime that can be embedded in
anything from ID cards to key fobs to hospital bracelets (to safeguard newborns, for
instance). Now consider Compliance Control's HyGenius system, which detects
restaurant employees' handwashing and soap usage with wireless communication
from clothing tags. Skip the soap, and you are in hot water.
Think that's invasive? At Citywatcher, a Cincinnati, Ohio, company that provides
video surveillance to police, some workers volunteered to have ID chips embedded in
their forearms last June. No more worries about lost or stolen ID cards, the employer
claimed. Sure. No more privacy either.
