You’re Not Paranoid; They Are Watching You

Career Tip: Beware! Big Brother is monitoring your use of e-mails and instant messaging.

Before you conclude it’s not happening at your place of employment consider these statistics from the American Management Association. Of the companies surveyed:

76% of the companies surveyed monitor Internet usage;
55% store and review e-mail;
51% use video surveillance;
50% store and review computer usage;
22% record phone calls.

The first concern of these monitoring tactics is preventing leaks of confidential information. Blocking out viruses and hackers come next. But it follows that they also turn up visits to porn sites, company gossip, criticisms of bosses and organizations, purchases made on line and personal information.

Also, many companies routinely sweep hotel conference rooms and other outside places for electronic-listening devices before confidential meetings are held.

Other employers are looking into software to be applied to cell phones.

Before you protest that these tactics are a violation of your privacy rights, know that generally speaking it is legal for companies to monitor their own corporate telephone records as well as computer and e-mail use on their own corporate accounts.

Job Tip: Stop, think before you post any message on the Internet; realize you are leaving a digital trail that theoretically will be floating around in Cyberspace forever.

Career Advice: Never post anything on the company’s computers that you wouldn’t want to see appear on the bulletin boards where you work.