This Mainichi article about the rise of spyware in Japan got me thinking about practicalities and ethics.
Practicalities first. I just scanned my computer with Ad-aware and found 64 different items spying on me without my knowledge. And I thought I ran a tight ship here.
Now ethics. No matter where you are, it's pretty much illegal to install monitoring software on computers you don't own. I think we'd all agree that that's right.
The problem arises when it comes to computers you do own. As it stands now, it's okay to install monitoring software on computers you own.
This means, of course, that it's in effect legal for companies to spy on their employees.
I don't know about you, but that strikes me as being a bit too 1984. The law seems to make sense, if you view a workplace computer merely as an item of property belonging to its owner.
But the situation is a bit more complex than that. A computer used in the workplace could as easily be seen as an extension of the identity of its main user, regardless of who has the property rights. Especially when so many of us spend our working lives joined at the hip to one of these machines.
And if you look at it that way, allowing companies to install monitoring software on it is a blatant violation of privacy.
There's also the breach of trust aspect. As it stands, companies don't even have to inform their employees that they are/could be using spyware to monitor their computer activities.
I'd be reluctantly willing to accept companies being allowed to spy on their workers if they had a duty to make it known they were doing so. The more dubious the right, the more obvious the need to balance it with responsibilities.
But the more respectful, more humane, and thus clearly more productive and efficient way of approaching it would be to see the real picture: An employee's computer is more an inviolable extension of an employee's self than a piece of property of a corporation.
Posted by Setsunai at April 21, 2005 11:06 AM | TrackBack