EMPLOYERS ARE SNOOPING ON WORKERS
By Randall Stross

December 30, 2007

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WERE Henry Ford brought back to life today, he would most likely be delighted by the Internet: the uninhibited way many people express themselves on the Web makes it easy to supervise the private lives of employees.

In his day, the Ford Motor Company maintained a “Sociological Department” staffed with investigators who visited the homes of all but the highest-level managers. Their job was to dig for information about the employee’s religion, spending and savings, drinking habits and how the worker “amused himself.”

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Home inspections are no longer needed; many companies are using the Internet to snoop on their employees. If you fail to maintain “professional” standards of conduct (=behavior) in your free time, you could lose your job.

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Employment law in most states provides little protection to workers who are punished for their online postings, said George Lenard, an employment lawyer at Harris Dowell Fisher & Harris in St. Louis. Most of us are holding on to our jobs only at the whim of our employers, and thus vulnerable.

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A line needs to be drawn that marks the boundary between work and private life. When a worker is on the job, companies have every right to supervise activities closely. But what an employee does after hours, as long as no laws are broken, is none of the company’s business.

Of course, what we used to call “off hours” are fewer now, and employees may connect to the office nightly from home. But when they do go home, how they spend their private time should be of no concern to their employer, even if the Internet, by its nature, makes some off-the-job activities more visible to more people than was previously possible.

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In the absence of strong protections for employees, poorly chosen words or even a single photograph posted online in one’s off-hours can have career-altering (=changing) consequences. Stacy Snyder, 25, who was a senior (=last year student) at Millersville University in Millersville, Pa., offers an example. Last year, she was dismissed from the student teaching program at a nearby high school and denied her teaching credential after the school staff came across her photograph on her MySpace profile.

Yet her photo seems to be surprisingly harmless. The photo, snapped (=taken) at a costume party, shows Ms. Snyder with a pirate’s hat on her head, drinking from a large plastic cup whose contents cannot be seen. When posting the photo, she unfortunately captioned her self-portrait “drunken pirate,” though whether she was serious can’t be decided by looking at the photo. She filed a lawsuit in April this year in federal court in Philadelphia claiming that her rights to free expression under the First Amendment had been violated. No trial date has been set.

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Although personal disclosure is the norm on social networking sites, The Pew Internet and American Life Project released the results of a study, “Digital Fingerprints,” showing that 60 percent of Internet users surveyed are not worried about how much information is available about them online. Accordingly, a lot of users won’t care to set tight privacy settings on these sites.

Ms. Snyder had also not set her MySpace privacy settings to restrict public access, but why should she have done so? She anticipated (=she saw it coming) that her profile page would be seen by school authorities. On it she said that as an adult, over the age of 21, she believed that “I have nothing to hide.”

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The day may come when nothing that is said online will be treated as embarrassing because we will have become accustomed to everyone disclosing everything. In the meanwhile, some people will be more cautious than Ms. Snyder. Ms. Fox of the Pew project recently paid a visit to New Orleans for a bachelorette party (=females only party) with female friends — husbands not included. She wanted to make sure that details of the festivities did not find their way to the Internet.

She instructed her friends: “If you’re going to upload the pictures, don’t tag with real names.” The photos went up, without traceable digital fingerprints.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.



Task 4. Reading: Find some information. Complete the statements with information from the article


1. If you want to leave no traceable digital fingerprints behind, then
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4. Ms Snyder defended herself saying
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5. One way of sharing photos safely could be to
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Task 5. Vocabulary: Fill in the gaps with vocabulary from the text.

1.       Find what MsSnyder did with her self-portrait: ……………………………………….
2.       What needs to be drawn if you want clear rules, clear boundaries:
…………………………………………..
3.       If you supervise activities in a strict way, you supervise it ………………………..
4.       Ms Snyder was denied what: …………………………………………..
5.       Strict privacy settings are like small pants: …………………………………………..