Question

You are the CEO of Flower Power, Inc., a fast growing chain of 100 florist shops based in the Southeastern United States. The company opened for business 5 years ago with just 20 employees and now has over 1500 employees.

The company is now in the process of installing a new computer network, which will, for the first time, link all of the company’s offices and locations. The company’s Chief Information Officer has approached you with a proposal to include a number of electronic surveillance features in the new network.

The proposed features include:

The ability of all MIS staff to view any employee emails at any time

The ability of all MIS staff to monitor what internet sites employees are viewing at any time

The ability of all MIS staff to “shadow” PCs of any employees, at any time, without the consent of those employees (“shadowing” allows a person, such as the MIS staff person, to monitor all a user’s activity on your PC from a remote location without the user’s knowledge)

If a PC or laptop is issued for an employee’s use away from the office for work use, all email and activities on that PC or laptop can be monitored as well

Cameras will be installed on PCs of every employee, allowing all MIS staff to monitor activities of every employee in their workspaces at any time

Your approval is needed to install this network and these features.

Answer 1

In given case company is interested to establish transparent business. This transparency in business process will develop good practice and help full to monitor and control.

Feature 1- view any employee email , it must view official email and not personal

Feature 2- Monitoring what employee are viewing.

Feature 3- Shadow pc

Discussion -

if personal email get view then employee interest will retard as violation of privacy is violation of fundamental right.

Here monitoring should not include rectification as here is one possibility if all m i s staff given authority to rectify then there will be frequent rectification and bias of data is possible. Hence supervision and monitoring must hold the view right and rectification right must be subjected after granting permission from c e o.

This proposal can be approve with some amendments to protect fundamental right of employee.