NEGATIVE – EMPLOYMENT – WORKPLACE SPYING 303

HARMS OF WORKPLACE SPYING ARE EXAGGERATED

FEARS OF EMPLOYER SPYING ARE OVERBLOWN

MARLA DICKERSON, TIMES STAFF WRITER, Los Angeles Times, June 7, 1999, SECTION: Business; Part C2; TITLE: CAREERS / TRUST YOUR BOSS // acs-VT2001

Such fears are overblown, said Lawrence Fineran, spokesman for the Washington-based National Assn. of Manufacturers. Employers have indeed increased their use of monitoring to combat theft, sloth and potential lawsuits, and a few zealots have clearly overstepped their limits, he admits. But he said the specter of bosses stalking workers every moment of the workday just isn't credible.

"Most employers go to great lengths not to abuse their right to know what employees are doing every minute on the job," Fineran said. "It's bad for morale. Besides, who has the time?"

EMPLOYEES HAVE COME TO EXPECT INVASIONS OF THEIR PRIVACY AT THE WORKPLACE

Rod Dixon, an attorney at the U.S. Department of Education, "With Nowhere to Hide: Workers are Scrambling for Privacy in the Digital Age," Journal of Technology Law and Policy, Spring 1999, 4 J. Tech. L. & Pol'y 1, EE2001-JGM, P.9

Employees may be far beyond future shock. The presence of some forms of surveillance in the worklace has become so common or expected that there seems to be a contemporary lack of outrage on the part of many workers when they actually discover the existence of monitoring devices; this is particularly true of video monitors (future shock is an obvious reference to the title of Alvin Toffler's 1970 book, Future Shock, a phrase Toffler used to describe how people were becoming overwhelmed by the future. This concept seems particularly appropriate as a notion to describe the state of mind of an individual who has been so overwhelmed by the presence of technology that he slowly, but paradoxically, becomes underwhelmed or beyond future shock).