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Many employers choose to monitor what their workers are viewing on the computers at work. The truth is, this is not only wrong, but a violation of many worker's privacy. Employees are given certain trusts by their employer, and if they can't be trusted, it does not make much sense for them to be hired in the first place.

I believe that there may be a time when an employer has the right to monitor what is being viewed, in a sense, by checking bandwidth. If an employee is downloading thousands of songs per day on the company's server, taking up large chunks of space while performing an act that is (as of now) illegal, it would show through in the large amount of bandwidth the employee was using. Of course, the employer has no reason to suspect anything unless the employee deliberately tells the employer about the internet usage, or the employee's work starts to become sloppy.

Although this may go into another issue entirely, a happy employee is a productive employee. I'm not advocating allowing them to do whatever they want, but the idea that checking their email and doing a little browsing is worthy of spying on workers is ludicrous. If an employee can finish all their work with enough time left over to check email, why not let them? Of course, if the employee is behind on work every day and spends all their time on youtube.com, maybe it is time to impose some limits. There is a big difference between a worker casually using the internet after they are done and one who does nothing all day but use the internet. The truth of the matter is that only one of these types need monitored, and I am willing to be dollars to donuts that it is always the latter.

Mostly, the problem with monitoring employee internet usage is that it violates the employee's privacy. This is especially true when the employee works from a laptop that they have purchased. There have been cases where employees lost their job for things they looked at on company computers while in the office. There have also been times when the same thing occurred for what the employee looked at while at home and on their own network. This kind of monitoring is borderline scary in reality, because it makes it obvious that the company is attempting to control the employee outside of work. Internet use is a privilege, but privacy is a right. I hope that most employers would understand and respect that.

Learn more about this author, Brad Mcnally.
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