Privacy invasion in business environments

It is not uncommon for business managers to use recent innovations in information and communications technology to monitor employees and job candidates. These methods not only rely on heavy surveillance during working hours of employees but can also be applied outside their professional environment, to impinge on their personal lives. Surveillance techniques encompass such traditional means like recording cameras to more recent methods including analyzing social networks pages, performing extensive web searches and dealing with online data brokers. While monitoring initiatives set up by employers can have benefits for companies, the threat to privacy they entail can deteriorate the mental and physical health of employees and have a negative impact on the quality of relationship between colleagues. Businesses have a social responsibility and need to ensure that their behavior does not infringe upon their employee's rights to privacy. In this non-technical paper, we discuss some online approaches adopted by companies regarding employee surveillance. We elaborate on various methods employed by managers to monitor their employees and gain as much information as possible on job candidates. Then, these techniques are further discussed from the standpoint of their moral and legal perspectives with regards to privacy rights.