Email Monitoring and ethics
Ruffled a friend's peace of mind by emailing some pictures of our group from the Master's days accidentally to her office email ID. There wasn't anything wrong with the pictures themselves, but I forgot that her company monitors all email traffic so the folks who do that got pissed I guess.
Should companies monitor email? If you are talking about outbound email, definitely. You don't want corporate secrets going out. Should they establish an email policy? If you want to avoid lawsuits, definitely so. Check out these links if you feel interested enough:
http://www.email-policy.com/
Is Email Monitoring Legal?
Of course, then there's the other issue of privacy. The fellow reading the emails becomes privy to all personal and corporate information flowing through the mail server. That person or set of people would know the pulse of the entire company. Would they use the information for any unethical or illegal purposes? Would they start telling the higher-ups that the people under them are exchanging complaints about a certain manager and his policies? Would some higher-up start harassing these people for more information? Its a scary situation.
Coming back to the case I mentioned at the start of this post, the monitoring folks took exception to an inbound email. I could never understand why. Monitoring inbound mails does not make sense at all. It seems more a waste of resources and maybe shows a weird taste for details in people's personal lives. I would not care is my employees received MP3s in their email as long as my company bandwidth was not bogged down.
Add to that the issue of long work hours. Employees in the IT field today work for anywhere between 12 to 16 hours. Of course they cannot spend a lot of time calling up people on the phone, while they are at a job. Its never possible to call all the people you know on a weekend. Email is a boon in these situations, it allows people the luxury to carry a dialog over days, at their own leisure. A "hi" sent on Monday may receive a "how are you" response on a Wednesday, and everyone's happy. So whats wrong if these people receive emails from their near and dear ones? It keeps them happy, and a happy employee is a good employee.
My company realises these things, and just to protect company secrets and network integrity, they have an outbound automated filter on attachments, and an inbound virus checker. Hopefully, other companies start realising these things and start releasing their strangle-hold on employee communications.
Should companies monitor email? If you are talking about outbound email, definitely. You don't want corporate secrets going out. Should they establish an email policy? If you want to avoid lawsuits, definitely so. Check out these links if you feel interested enough:
http://www.email-policy.com/
Is Email Monitoring Legal?
Of course, then there's the other issue of privacy. The fellow reading the emails becomes privy to all personal and corporate information flowing through the mail server. That person or set of people would know the pulse of the entire company. Would they use the information for any unethical or illegal purposes? Would they start telling the higher-ups that the people under them are exchanging complaints about a certain manager and his policies? Would some higher-up start harassing these people for more information? Its a scary situation.
Coming back to the case I mentioned at the start of this post, the monitoring folks took exception to an inbound email. I could never understand why. Monitoring inbound mails does not make sense at all. It seems more a waste of resources and maybe shows a weird taste for details in people's personal lives. I would not care is my employees received MP3s in their email as long as my company bandwidth was not bogged down.
Add to that the issue of long work hours. Employees in the IT field today work for anywhere between 12 to 16 hours. Of course they cannot spend a lot of time calling up people on the phone, while they are at a job. Its never possible to call all the people you know on a weekend. Email is a boon in these situations, it allows people the luxury to carry a dialog over days, at their own leisure. A "hi" sent on Monday may receive a "how are you" response on a Wednesday, and everyone's happy. So whats wrong if these people receive emails from their near and dear ones? It keeps them happy, and a happy employee is a good employee.
My company realises these things, and just to protect company secrets and network integrity, they have an outbound automated filter on attachments, and an inbound virus checker. Hopefully, other companies start realising these things and start releasing their strangle-hold on employee communications.
posted by Dream Runner | 9:41 AM
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