Dataveillance: Employee Monitoring & Information Privacy Concerns in the Workplace

Information privacy concerns are a dominant concern of the information age. Such concerns emanate from the tension between the correct use of personal information and information privacy. That tension has extended to the computer-mediated work environment as employees are becoming increasingly aware of the ways in which management can employ technologies to monitor their email and Internet interactions. Such information privacy concerns have the potential to negatively impact organisational productivity and employee morale. The aim of this paper is to outline some of the major issues relating to workplace surveillance and provide a balanced perspective that identifies the emerging issues and subsequent privacy concerns from the employee’s perspective as well as the rationale underlying managements’ decision to employ monitoring technologies in the workplace. In doing so, it attempts to progress academic understanding of this issue and enhance practitioners’ understanding of the factors that influence employees’ technology-related privacy concerns. DOI: 10.4018/jitr.2012040103 32 Journal of Information Technology Research, 5(2), 31-45, April-June 2012 Copyright © 2012, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. would not avail of the obvious empowering benefits that these communication-monitoring technologies afford them. Furthermore, it can be argued that they may in fact have legitimate reasons to monitor employee actions in the first place. A number of questions surround the issue of workplace surveillance in particular those relating to the ethical nature of managements’ ability to monitor employees computer interactions. The aim of this paper therefore is to outline some of the major issues relating to workplace surveillance, to identify the emerging issues and subsequent privacy concerns from the employee’s perspective, as well as the motivation behind managements’ decision to employ monitoring technologies in the workplace. As such, this paper explores the ethical impact of monitoring in the computer-mediated work environment, addressing whether management’s ability to monitor employee actions in workplace represents good business practice or constitutes an invasion of privacy.