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People also use their home internet connections to violate IP, confidentiality and insider trading agreements. Using the purported Apple-logic from this post,
by wheels 17y ago
People also use their home internet connections to violate IP, confidentiality and insider trading agreements. Using the purported Apple-logic from this post, Apple is (indirectly) paying for that too, so shouldn't they be able to monitor those connections as well?
A utility argument here, I don't believe is the way to approach this. There are all sort of "useful" things that companies could do that most folks would agree cross the line into invasion of privacy, in the US or elsewhere.
I think there are two important assumptions I'm working with:
- People have a right to privacy in personal affairs
- The work place being only for work is an idealization that in practice does not exist
My argument won't make sense if you don't agree on those two.
Employment is one of the fundamental elements of the social fabric, and the rights of employers and employees are participant to a more general social contract. There exists a line at which a company must sacrifice some utility to uphold its end of that contract (e.g. they can't make people work 12 hour shifts, 7 days a week, even if they think it'd boost output), and as employers have an imbalance of power in negotiating employment terms, the government, in the interest of the people, lays down some guidelines for what the minimum boundaries are. Every developed country has this. The only variant is the extent of those stipulations, not their existence.
I believe the right to privacy is important enough that it's something that an employee should not be obliged to forfeit it in an employment contract. And since it's clear that personal and professional spheres overlap in the workplace, no, I don't think the company should have unrestricted access to an employee's data or actions in the workplace or through work-provided mediums. I don't think there should be microphones in every room; I don't believe that all thoughts discussed in the coffee corner are thusly entitled to the company. Even if they did buy the coffee and the chairs and are paying you at that time. And for me, and the legislators of many (most?) western countries, that clearly extends to internet access and company cell phones.
- tptacek 17y agoScott, employees generally are only able to use their home Internet connections to violate confidentiality because their work computers and connections are poorly policed. And, it is as a direct result of rampant abuse of company resources that companies are now deploying draconian security controls on worker machines, locking down USB connections and intercepting and parsing Word documents in the OS kernel. I've been involved in several deployments of these products (not a fan), and I can tell you that it's not an abstract concern that is driving their adoption. Bad stuff is routinely happening on company networks, and companies need to be able to protect themselves. People have a right to privacy in personal affairs, but people need to make arrangements for their privacy when they're at the workplace. The idea that a Dell desktop that a Fortune 500 company provides you with becomes a bastion of personal privacy just because you decide to use it to check your GMail is untenable. Companies need workers to be able to handle sensitive information, and they need workers to be able to use computers and networks to do their job, and they cannot be expected to grin and bear it as their confidential information walks out the door and onto Yahoo Finance message boards. Germany has powerful computer privacy laws. It is also not a great epicenter of tech entrepreneurship.
- wheels 17y agoI'm not arguing that these things aren't useful or driven by real problem; I'm arguing that they're wrong. As are the actions of employees in harming the companies they work for. But the American stubbornness in me goes back to the same logic of the Fourth Amendment, that despite the no doubt usefulness from a policing perspective of being able to search people without jumping through a lot of hoops, it is still wrong. The issue of Germany and entrepreneurship is a whole different rant, and there are legal barriers here which I believe stifle entrepreneurship. (The essence of the real rant though is that it's a deeper cultural issue.) But Germany sans privacy laws wouldn't suddenly be an entrepreneurial hotbed. If we're talking easing incorporation, sure. Making it easier to hire and fire people? Once again, I'd be on board. But I don't think privacy is a significant component of the equation.
- tptacek 17y agoWhat does the Fourth Amendment have to do with a company searching it's own property? I just don't understand why you think that's wrong! I'm an ACLU-giving privacy nut (and I have real problems with how IT security is often managed), and I recoil from the idea that company employees should somehow have some claim on company property simply because they've been allowed to touch it.
- wheels 17y agoI'm not saying that the right is guaranteed by the fourth amendment, just that the logic is similar. Trying to boil down our disagreement: I don't believe that ownership of a device or communications medium entitles one to all of the information which passes through it. It seems we differ there. So for me that leaves no conflict between something not being my property, but the things which are on it still being mine. "What should a company be able to monitor?" is separate, where both utility and privacy are part of the formula. I believe, morally, not from a utilitarian perspective, that personal privacy trumps corporate utility in this particular case and that a reasonable set of privacy laws encode that.
- 17y ago