ual, the employer will want to ensure that employees perform their jobs at an appropriate level. Therefore, the growing trend is to induce more on-the-job monitoring and personal information gathering. Employers are finding additional resources for observing and gathering information on an employee due to technology and availability of information. The following are the most common methods, practices, and resources used by employers on the job and their effects on employee privacy.Telephone monitoring has been a long-time practice used by employers for reasons of quality control with clients and customers. However, in the same process, employers are monitoring personal calls of employees. Under federal law, when an employer realizes the call is personal, he or she must immediately stop monitoring the call (9). So the issue becomes a matter of integrity on the part of the employer to stop listening to the conversation. If company policy states that employees are not to make personal calls, then all conversations can be legally monitored. If an employee uses a headset phone without a mute switch, then employees can even monitor personal conversations with co-workers when not actually using the phone. Employers can also obtain a record of all phone calls made from a worker’s phone. A device called a pen register can record telephone numbers dialed from phone extensions and also the length of time of each call. While federal law prohibits the use of pen registers in the public sector (10), the private sector does not have to abide by those laws.Computer monitoring is a direct way employers can gain entrance into an employee’s workspace undetected. Special software can allow an employer to see what is on the screen at any given time, including Internet sites, or see what is stored in the employee’s computer terminal and hard drive. Persons involved with intensive data entry or word processing can even be subj...
