Workplace Privacy, A Thing of the Past?
Say hello to your newest colleague: Big Brother

By T.J. DeGroat

Of the string of CEO ousters that rocked corporate America this year, arguably the most interesting to twentysomethings was Harry Stonecipher's.

The former CEO of Boeing was fired for having an adulterous affair with a female employee. It wasn't the sex that made me follow the story, though, nor was it the irony that Stonecipher was recruited a few years ago to help Boeing climb out of another ethics scandal. Both facts piqued my interest, but the part of the story I zeroed in on was the way the affair was uncovered -- through notes Stonecipher and his lover sent via inter-office email.

That's right, even when you're in the executive suite, Big Brother is watching.

Anyone who has logged a few years in the business world -- whether working for a corporate behemoth like Boeing or a boutique firm -- probably realizes that what’s done on a work computer is anything but private. If you're still in the dark or are a virgin to corporate America, read carefully.

In a recent American Management Association survey of 840 U.S. companies, 60 percent said they monitor their employees' incoming and outgoing email. That's up from 47 percent in 2001. Internal email conversations between employees are less important, but about 27 percent of employers reported using software to monitor those as well.

And don't bother complaining. As an employee, you have virtually no rights. There are few laws regulating electronic surveillance in the private sector workplace, according to the National Workrights Institute, a privacy-advocacy organization. Only Connecticut and Delaware have laws requiring companies to notify employees that email is monitored.

TrueActive Software is one of the leaders in email-scanning software, a market that is growing at a rate of about 30 percent a year and now brings in between $250 million and $300 million. The growth is due in large part to the increasing sophistication of the programs. In the past, the software would check emails against a list of standard keywords. But today's programs are customizable, so companies can look for the names of executives, competitors or products in addition to the traditional list of sexual terms and profanity. Everyone should know not to discuss their nasty sexual habits in work email, but the current trends suggest that even mentioning a boss' first name could send up a red flag.

A friend who works for a small company knows that her employers reserve the right to monitor workers' email. And they do. No one has officially said so, but through her interaction with the IT director, she knows that emails sent outside the company can be examined. She once complained that a client hadn't received something and the IT expert was able to check out the email queue to find out if it was stuck. And when an employee quits or is fired, all subsequent email is forwarded to the supervisor, so all sorts of secrets could be revealed even after the worker is gone.

This twentysomething employee also knows that there's no such thing as a real delete key. Many people think they're in the clear because they know that they have to delete their email and then purge the trash folder. But at this company, all data is backed up every night by a company located across the country. That includes email.

Many employees keep their gossipy or personal notes to web-based email programs such as Yahoo! or Hotmail. That could prevent nosy network administrators from snooping, but an increasing number of companies are purchasing computer programs that allows them to monitor literally every keystroke an employee makes. If you give your boss a reason to suspect that you're spending more time on Yahoo! than on those expense reports, someone can review everything you did on your office computer on a certain day. Or if there's some free time, a supervisor can randomly jump from computer to computer to check out how employees spend their time.

The TrueActive software shows every URL an employee visited and how long he or she stayed there. It also keeps a log of every keystroke as it is pressed. At the end of the monitoring period, it makes everything nice and readable for employers, deleting the backspaces, arrows, delete keys and other edits to display an easy-to-follow final output.

The rule of thumb is this: Never write anything using your office computer that you wouldn't be prepared to say at the next department meeting.

So think twice before you question your boss' sanity in a catty email to a friend in the next cubicle. Gossip is much more fun when whispered at the old, reliable water cooler. As long as it isn’t bugged.

Hatch senior editor T.J. DeGroat is watching you right now.