Beware the little brother of surveillance – your employer

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/01/surveillance-employer-little-brother-snooping

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With all the recent palaver about official surveillance, we might be forgiven for thinking that we are all under constant, intrusive observation. The panopticon society is here to stay, and little that we think, do or say is hidden from the harsh gaze of the UK government.

Or maybe not. The idea that the state cares all that much about most of us is probably a little overdone, whereas a much greater threat – employer surveillance – is regularly overlooked. Its not hard to see why. When I worked for one of the UK's largest financial institutions, it was broadly assumed by my colleagues that the company could, if it wished, check up on the emails we were sending and websites we visited. Whether they were allowed to do that was another matter, the subject of occasional heated discussion over lunch.

So, too, was a firm belief that the trading floors were secretly filmed, with a wilder fringe expounding on a "secret security floor" within our HQ building – a 24-storey glass monstrosity at the heart of the city. Despite being one of the company's data protection "champions", and supposedly responsible for my department's security, I never found evidence of either.

Still, all the ingredients were there, and correctly identified. Companies can and do monitor where emails go and what websites are visited: what phone numbers you dial, and for how long you speak. They can take screenshots, log keystrokes or film you as you go about your daily business on and off the premises.

Some will take advantage of all these options, even though UK law (despite a certain fuzziness) remains mostly on the side of the employee. Workers have a right to privacy, which tends to manifest as knowing exactly what security measures are in place around them: what will be logged, opened, read; when and where they will be filmed, if at all. But the key word here is proportionality.

A recent employee appeal tribunal ruled that an employee was not unfairly dismissed if their employer took covert footage of them visiting a sports centre while supposedly off sick. Many of us, I imagine, would not consider this too unreasonable. But what of employers trawling through your Facebook pages, looking for evidence of out of hours social activities that might prove embarrassing to the company?

What of freedom of information revelations about the extraordinary number of adult web pages visits blocked by parliament's own security software. MPs, however self-important, are, after all, no more than employees. Should we, their employers, not be entitled to know who was trying to visit which pages? Or do even MPs have a right to some privacy?

And then there's the case from the US in August, when a nosy employer went hunting through an employee's online usage, and found the latter had ordered a rucksack and a pressure cooker – both items used in the Boston bombing? Cue swift call to Homeland Security – and equally swift visit from the FBI. Fair? Proportionate? Necessary?

In the end, and whatever the legal safeguards, the problem divides into three separate but equally difficult parts. Firstly, there is a widespread presumption that such surveillance "just happens", or is otherwise lawful. A call I received just last week from a former client puts this into perspective: they were regularly looking at their employee data. They had been for years. It had never occurred to them that there was anything wrong in doing so. Lately, though, doubts had crept in: would I reassure them that they could do this? Sorry: no can do.

Secondly, the advancing technology means that next to nothing in or around the workplace is ever truly hidden. Finally, it may be that the law must set far higher barriers to cross before it becomes OK to read the content of an employee's email, as opposed to simply checking where it is going.

But who's to know? And if, like some jealous lover, your employer does read the occasional email and discovers you being unfaithful with their biggest rival, it's not too difficult for them to cover tracks, begin an investigation on entirely different grounds – and catch you all the same. Let's face it: we may all worry far too much of the time about the big brother state – when really it is little brother, our employer, that we should really be worrying about.

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