Reasons for Employer Monitoring:

Why Do Employers Monitor?

The reasons employers give for monitoring their employees can roughly be broken into 4 categories: 1. Waste of computing and network resources, 2. productivity loss, 3. Protecting trade secrets and 4. Possible legal liability for employee activities:

Waste of computing/network resources- Corporate America spends billions of dollars per year for Internet access for its employees. The public sector spends nearly as much. Networks and electronic communication systems, no matter how extensive and advanced, have a finite capacity. Excessive personal use by employees can and do lead to system bottlenecks and/or eventual denial of service. A good example of this problem occurred in May of 2000 when Victoria's Secret had its annual fashion show, more than 2 million people viewed the show, mostly from their workplace PC's. The webcast monopolized huge chunks of network bandwidth and choked numerous corporate networks. A study in 2000 found that companies' network-computing resources were being slowly degraded by an ever increasing assault of employee use of real-time data, streaming media, A/V downloads, file sharing, etc.. (8),(9)

Productivity loss- In 2001, Websense, an Internet employee management company estimated that U.S. businesses lost over $2,000.00 a second, or 63 billion dollars a year from employee productivity loss due to Internet misuse. Websense arrived at these figures using statistics compiled by the research firms Dataquest and IDC which concluded that approximately 22.8 million U.S. employees waste 1 or more work hours on the Internet. This was about 40 percent of the total Internet-enabled work force in 2001 (9). Research from ComScore Networks found that, even excluding auction sites, 59 percent of all 2001 Web purchases were made from the workplace. In another study Vault.com found that 47 percent of the American workforce spend at least a half an hour a day cruising the Web for personal reasons.(10) Image 1 displays a breakdown of the most popular non-business related Internet activities that employees engage in at work.

Protecting trade secrets- Corporate financial, legal, and research documents and data may be of high monetary value to an employer and the ease with which electronic documentation can be moved and copied makes the risk of information theft a serious threat to corporate success. With the click of a mouse or a few keystrokes, an employee can copy and transmit documentation worth millions of dollars to a corporate competitor, foreign government, news agency, special interest advocate, etc (11).

Possible legal liability for employee misuse- As shown in Image 2, various legal doctrines can be used to hold employers liable for their employees' misuse of their corporate information infrastructure. Defamation, negligent hiring, sexual harassment, negligent hiring and retention, and accessory to criminal activity or personal injury are all possible charges which an employer could face in civil or criminal court due to employee activities on the Internet. One of the greatest liability woes is that when workers are exposed to offensive graphic material on coworker's computer screens, it is the company who can be held responsible in court for maintaining a hostile and intimidating work environment.(8),(11).