What Your Boss Could Learn by Reading the Whole Company’s Emails
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Haha, this is a nice bit of rhetoric judo. I think the bigger issue is usually bosses being honest with employees.
They collect meta data, but it's still a group invasion of privacy.
Also, the article reads like a sales pitch for KeenCorp.
You shouldn't expect any privacy regarding anything you do at or for work (other than using the restroom). The email and chat servers are theirs, and they have every right to read the emails. Good companies will at least tell you when they're reading your email, but legally they don't even have to do that.
We have experience what happens when you give people unrestricted access to data to do with whatever they want. Spoiler: It leads to bad outcomes.
https://www.mofo.com/resources/publications/employer-surveil...
If that’s so, I’m quite shocked. How does this play out in courts? Does an employer in Germany have to sue an employee in order to access such information?
Though it's certainly a very American thing for employees to argue that corporations having power over them is the right and proper order of things.
Why would it be otherwise?
You are paid to do the company's business with the equipment they provide. It's not a matter of 'power'.
Imagine a UPS driver taking the van to run errands for his friends. Few people would argue that it is inappropriate for UPS to track the van and fuel usage. Maybe he scrawls anti-management missives and keeps them in the glovebox. Why is IT different?
Imagine someone who is breaking the law at work and someone who is breaking the same law in their home. Just substitute "employer" for "government" as a reason why people should be constantly and fully monitored without any probably cause. It's basically like saying everyone's electronic communication should be monitored at all times to see if they are feeling sad, angry, etc. which might put them at risk of committing a crime.
The right to privacy is fundamental to freedom and it shouldn't stop once you walk in the workplace.
I doubt there exists a company anywhere that's not monitoring email at least for spam and viruses.
There's certain times where it's not only acceptable but actually required to "violate employee's privacy" by searching their personal possessions - think airline employees, prison employees, etc.
Most companies will have some sort of auditing software on their critical servers to detect (and report) both unauthorized access but also unauthorized activity. I seriously doubt this is illegal in Europe. It's very difficult to take serious the position "my boss shouldn't know I logged into the production server and downloaded the whole database because 'I have privacy.'"
I'm an American, and it seems many of my countrymen think property rights should trump all other rights.
That is now relevant in the whole EU for example and it is a very sensible rule.
Maybe I am the conservative here, but I wouldn't expect my provider and mail provider to look into my private communication. Even if it is 100% their infrastructure.
Maybe we shouldn't expect it, but having a legislative insurance certainly helps.
Note that Microsoft actually DID violate user privacy by reading hosted emails when they thought it would help them catch a leaker. Institutionally they have never had a history of ethical behaviour regardless of how much their founder now gives to charity.
An employer provided email is another matter. Superficially all email ought to be company business in which at least one party is acting as the agent of the company. In reality personal matters are probably frequently intermingled even between two employees of the org providing the email. What's public and what's private becomes complicated.
If there is a dispute do you ask both parties to voluntarily turn over emails? In a dispute between a party inside and outside of the org do you make do on what you can get voluntarily turned over?
Do you merely make do without such evidence? Does one go to court and request such if needed from your own org? If that is the standard how does one enforce proper disclosure when there is no adversarial situation?
So does Yahoo/Verizon/Oath (recent HN thread) for commercial reasons (data-harvesting, targeting, ads). Google did this too until 2016, apparently. Note: automated, so probably not literally reading in person..
Most employee manuals I have read actually directly state this in their company policy as an agreement of use of company email and internet.
Workers are not untrustworthy beasts that need to be corralled, or at least shouldn't be, and we shouldn't accept being told that we are. _We_ are the ones who create the value, _we_ are the ones who the world could not run without.
The good thing about capitalism is that profitability wins. If a company can be more profitable without managers they will have a competitive advantage in the marketplace and that organisational structure will spread.
As humans we see leaders and a hierarchies in most of our organizations. They seem to be pretty helpful.
Don't say in email what you should say over the phone. Don't say over the phone what you should say in person.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/labor-board-backs-startup-engine...
> Despite their futuristic sheen, tech companies “actually operate like traditional industrialists and will go through old fashioned methods of suppressing workers,” he says.
The problem is there are grey lines everywhere and people are usually more judgemental of others than themselves even if they knowingly or unknowingly participate in the same behavior.
Today, I think a good correlary might be, “write every email as if it will be released to the public by Russian hackers, with random excerpts screencapped and highlighted and tweeted out of context by trolls”. Though maybe if you’re just working on a presidential campaign.
Well if that isn't the biggest pile of horse shit I've ever heard, I don't know what is.
We don't read your e-mails, we just have a program that injests the contents of your email and assign you an unexplainable number that might get you fired. Oh, and we lied about reading your e-mails, this software totally does that. Trust us!