Question

As the use of electronic communication at work has risen, new ethical issues involving worker privacy have emerged. Should employers be allowed to read employee e-mail, inspect their Facebook pages or blogs, or access files located on a personal computer at work? Discuss at least two reasons why or why not?

Answer 1

I think everyone should enjoy the rights to Privacy and in this regard, the employees shall be no exception. In this regard, I do not think it is fair to research a candidate’s social media profile other than if it is an official profile especially intended for the job and recruitment purpose such as LinkedIn and if the matter pertains to the employee, even in that case, unless the employee intends to share the information of the Company’s intranet, all his Public profile should be kept away from his Professional activities because that is not meant for his work front. It is purely a personal space of an employee that the Employer is attempting to invade, which, even in terms of Business ethics, is wrong. The reason being, the personal aspects of a candidate or an employee might create a biased impression of the candidate on the minds of the recruiters or affect the Appraiser’s judgment towards the employee to the extent that the employee’s work performance is overpowered by the Personal activities on social media front, which is certainly not desirable in any work process. While employing, the recruiter needs to maintain a neutral stand, free from any sort of biasness, in order to recruit a candidate based upon his professional worth to the Organization and hence to uncover information about a candidate through his social media profiles is rather an unethical approach. On the other side, even for the Performance appraisal and other job assignments, the personal information of the employee, which may actually be irrelevant to the work front, may also cause considerable damage while assigning activities to the employees, neutrally.

Same goes in the case of assessing of e-mails and blogs of the employees or accessing the files located on a personal computer at work. There could be possibilities of certain personal mails flowing into the system which the employees may have yet not filtered. However that shall not mean that the employee does not want to take any necessary actions upon such personal information. The employee may lack time to simply go about it. If such information is revealed to the employers, that could be either embarrassing for the employees to deal with or maybe the employees feel reluctant to discuss about the same. Landing them in such an awkward position that may have absolutely no business to do with the Organization, is again, not desirable and may have adverse impact upon the attitude of such employees at work. Hence, employers should not be allowed to breach the line of privacy and get access to the employee’s mails or to social media pages or accounts, etc. The work integrity should be maintained.