The privacy of your medical records - Essay Example

However, many have come to accept that their employer has the right to essentially do the same thing by monitoring emails. Is wrong always wrong or do employers have a widely agreed upon caveat to intrude on the privacy of American citizens? Some believe that because the Constitution forbids illegal searches which are the precedent for disallowing the wiretapping of citizens, this should apply to businesses as well. Computer networks are especially susceptible to employer scrutiny. According to a Privacy Foundation study (Privacy Foundation, 2001), 14 million U.S. employees are subject to this type of surveillance on a constant basis.

Employers use specially designed software for this purpose. They are able to scrutinize employee e-mail by randomly reading communications or by selecting key ‘damaging’ words or phrases in order to flag e-mail. The software evaluates a company’s e-mail messages by selected term of phrase and makes a determination regarding whether a message is genuine and non-threatening corporate business. These programs are becoming ever more sophisticated using algorithms to evaluate communications patterns and relay this information to employers.

Many employers are always just a click or two away from viewing every e-mail message that employees send or receive on computers included on the network. These employers give a variety of justifications for spying on their employees’ communications including the protection of trade secrets, the prevention of internal problems or excess e-mails clogging networks by using too much bandwidth. Another popular reason given for monitoring personal e-mails is to prevent employees from using company time for personal communications.

Checking for quality of work would violate few people’s idea of crossing the privacy boundary but that is seldom a reason given for such monitoring. According to the American Management Study (2001), close to “two-thirds of all companies