Effects Of Surveillance On Employees

Abstract
This paper will explain why employers monitor their employees in the workplace and what are the recent devices and programs used in the monitoring process. The paper will examine also the effects of the surveillance on the employees’ psychological health and their rights to privacy. Nowadays, the negative effects of surveillance must be discussed and solved. In addition, a solution is given to ease the controversy between the employer’s work protection and the employees’ privacy rights. Last, the paper gives ways to let the employers know how to deal with their staffs at work without restricting them.

Introduction
The flow of information and the rapid speed of technologies lead to the trend of globalization. Globalization

Companies risk the decrease of the productivity if they do not control and monitor the behavior of the employees on the Internet. The senior engineer Mark Ackerman says that according to the statistics done by IT research firm Gartner, off-task websites visited on the Internet in most of the American businesses leads to 40% productivity loss each year (2011). New technologies have made it easier for employers to monitor their employees. In today’s information age, companies are using monitoring programs and software to record the work of the employees on their computers. One of the important programs used is the “Network Enforcer”. This program is able to immediately close the application or website specified by the

Employee privacy rights include the protection of his personal information and tasks at work. Due to the expansion of new technologies and the rise of the Internet, employees begin to concern about their privacy threat in the workplace. All these new high technology overpass the limits of information privacy. Kovacs mentions in his TED talk “Tracking our online trackers” that the Internet has opened up the world to us, but it also opened us to the world (Kovacs, 2012).The cost of this exchange is our privacy. Kovacs says that every single detail including our birth dates or our interests is recorded by unknown users. The employer can be one of these unknown users who track the employees and know specific details about their lives. This negative effect of surveillance leads also to identity and data theft. Surveillance has lots of advantages for employers, but it does not make it free from disadvantages also. The employers who count on the surveillance systems to boost the abilities of the employees in the workplace will receive back the negative effects on their