Employees have no privacy

The laws that govern employee privacy are limited to discriminatory acts and invasive practices. Those records which would not be acceptable to base a hiring decision on, such as medical records, remain protected unless the employer has reason to request them; i.e. to ascertain the fitness of the employee to perform a specific task. Invasive practices go beyond workplace security into the off-site life of the employee. THis includes monitoring the employee’s off-hours location and activities and reading the employee’s personal mail if it’s routed to the workplace. This leaves most everything else open for employer’s to monitor. A work laptop has no expectation of privacy, which includes all email correspondence and all files and browsing history on the machine. Employers may install surveillance cameras at any reasonable place. While the efforts to directly monitor employees is probably not worth it to many employers, there is no legal reason they may not record every action their employees take at work, by video, audio, and electronic storage. With reason, an employer may even inspect a person’s backpack, purse, or even their body as in the case of a diamond mine ((Fleischer, pg. 280)).

Because employees have no expectation of privacy, employers are responsible for the documentation of any activities, electronic and otherwise, that the employee does while at work and may be required to relinquish any record in a legal investigation. Every email or document could potentially be used in a court of law as evidence for any number of law suits, from discrimination to fraud. As a result, technology that stores these materials safely and software that may access these records and equip a legal team to sift through them for relevant documents is a vital part of any larger corporation in the United States.

As an employee, the absence of employee privacy protections is unnerving. In the e-discovery industry that I work in, our software equips employers to identify relevant information from every electronic means imaginable. I am fully aware that any email, Slack message, document, or otherwise might one day be loaded into our software to protect or prosecute me in a legal battle. What bothers me most is the companies whose business model centers on employee surveillance. For example, a company has developed software that works alongside ours to monitor legal reviewer activity. The software records both the screen and the reviewer at all times and gives managers the ability to ‘check in’ on any person whenever they please without the reviewer’s knowledge that it’s happening (the reviewer does know it could happen). Alerts are set up to go off whenever a reviewer has not logged activity within a certain period of time, or if the reviewer switches to any other screen than the review software. Although nothing in this model breaches employee expectations of privacy, the constant and active surveillance is unsettling and sounds more like a chapter out of the book 1984 than a typical business practice.

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