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The laws governing monitoring of employee e-mail and Internet use are nebulous at best, but experts agree that companies should, at the very least, notify workers that they may be monitored.
"It's only fair for the employer to notify the employee that they may be, or are, monitored," says Beth Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego. "Notice is the most basic of rights that employees should have when the employer is using any kind of monitoring. But legally, they don't have to [notify employees], except in the state of Connecticut."
Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute in Princeton, N.J., says that because employee monitoring is sometimes a "necessary evil," employers shouldn't make that monitoring more intrusive than it needs to be.
"When it comes to Web site monitoring, employers don't have to spell out their policies to employees, although it would be nice if they did," he says. "What they should do is program their Web access policy into their Web access software, so the policy can be enforced. If they would manage Internet access instead of monitoring it, everything would be fine."
While she says she understands why employers need to monitor employees' use of e-mail and the Internet, Paula Brantner, program director of San Francisco-based Workplace Fairness, says the most successful way to deal with the issue is to articulate a very clear policy upfront and enforce it evenhandedly.
Lee Tien, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, goes a step further. "It's not enough to rely on policy; [employers] need to have every employee sign a consent form, giving them permission [to monitor]," he says. "It's dangerous for employers not to have that kind of protection."
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