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Boss isn’t around,
his spy software is
Software such as Orvell Monitoring 2002, for example, lets a manager see not only every Website visited and every e-mail received or sent, but also reveals every application that is opened and every key tapped. Contributions in chatrooms are there for reviewing, as are passwords. Orvell also allows the snooper to set up a list of keywords that will alert management when they are entered. The program can even photograph the screen of each worker. "Orvell Monitoring 2002 is ideal for companies and organisations that want to know whether their workers are doing private Internet surfing or wasting their working day with games," says the Internet advertisement for one such snoop software. "Approximately half of the buyers (for this type of software) are companies," says Carsten Rau, whose company produces Orvell. The program is particularly needed to detect economic espionage or the dissemination of racist content by employees, he insists.The seamless usage protocols let an employer determine why one worker is shouldering only 20 per cent of the load while a co-worker struggles with the other 80 per cent, Rau explains. Yet these justifications as quality controls bring only condemnation from privacy advocates. "Privacy rights do not stop at the workplace door any more than do constitutional expectations for unmonitored telecommunications," says Rena Tangens, of the German Association for the Promotion of Mobile and Immobile Public Data Traffic (FoeBuD). Her organisation awarded Orvell’s creators ProtectCom with the dubious honour of the "Big Brother Award" in the "Work site Surveillance" category. With the award, the organisation hopes to highlight firms perceived to be impinging on the private sphere of workers or customers. In some countries, the legality of these snooping programs remains undetermined. "There have not been any official decisions on this matter," explains Wolfgang Daeubler, Professor for European Employment Law at the University of Bremen. Employers interested in putting the programs to work should consult a privacy specialist in their country. Even without a firm
precedent, Daeubler for one doubts that the employer’s right to
surveillance will be upheld. He suspects that it is largely firms who
cannot afford an in-house lawyer that have put the — DPA |
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WHAT
are workers really doing during working hours? For bosses who have
dreamt of having total control over their workers, knowing their every
move, the introduction of specialised snooping programs may be the
answer.