Imagine that your employer is watching you eight hours a day and constantly checking ‘What you are doing?' throughout the day. Does your boss have the right to do so? Or do you have privacy rights? Through modern technology and advancement in the field of surveillance monitoring, it is nearly impossible to do anything without your employer knowing about it. Surveillance monitoring has become so common in the 21stcentury that it is now part of our daily lives. However, there is a lot of controversy around whether it is ethical or not for companies to utilize these ‘spy' technologies to monitor their employees.
The International Data Cooperation declared that the ‘spy' and monitoring technologies have “a yearly growth rate of 20.9%,” (Wakefield, Robin) which means that there is an ongoing interest by companies to monitor their employees, although this continues to annoy, distract, and penetrate the employee's privacy. Therefore, it should be important to identify and regulate how and where this technology is to be used. On one hand, it may be ethical for schools to use monitoring and filtration systems to ensure the student's safety and appropriate behavior during school hours. This is due to the fact that students may still be immature and thus can be harmed by accessing some websites or harassed by online users, but for the purpose of this essay I am not going to discuss this matter, because parents or guardians expect their children to be safe and well-behaved in school. On the other hand, it is not ethical to monitor company employees as they are adults that have been selected by the company on certain criteria including responsibility and trust, and thus should be capable of successfully completing the job or otherwise bearing the consequences.
[...] Moreover, the employee in turn affect productivity or the culture of the workplace.” For example, if a student is writing a paper and the teacher is constantly looking at his paper, the student will most probably do more mistakes than the usual because he is focusing on not doing a single mistake instead of writing correctly. The same case may apply to an employee at work as he spends time thinking about how to bypass the monitoring surveillance system rather than putting all his effort and input on developing his work. [...]
[...] A good example of a surveillance monitoring system is the software Spector 360 which monitors an employee's computer and completely eliminates personal life from an employee workspace. (The video will show you some things about the software) (Spector 360 - Employee Monitoring) Monitoring also affects the behavior of the employees towards work resulting in the increase of boredom. Employees will always get bored from work, because as humans they cannot be switched on or off, they have feelings and emotions that should be expressed. [...]
[...] For example, in a company in the United States had a fully automated surveillance monitoring system, the software identified an employee of a conviction for cocaine possession, thus the company fired that employee. However, later it was recognized that information was patently false” as Laura Hartman asserted, and that the software was confused by two similar names. On the other hand, there is an exception for both military and science organizations, in which a secret can destroy a whole country or even the world. [...]
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