After reading the article Snooping Bosses I must say it does raise quite an interesting matter. Both sides do indeed make valid points, and it seems to be a question of how to keep a good balance.
It seems fair that employers want to ensure that their employers work efficiently and that they do not leak corporate secrets or practise any kind of criminal activity. It is completely understandable to me that companies are checking their employees' web habits (at office computers of course) as mentioned in the article. This is of high relevance to the employers as they do not want their workers wasting time surfing on office hours, and especially not porn surfing. Neither do I find it to alarming that employers disable personal email accounts at office computers and check for red flags in the content of the work mail. In general, I find most so called snooping by bosses similar to what I just mentioned acceptable as long as it is limited to the office during office hours.
However, the matter becomes alarming when the snooping is taken to another level in the aspect of when it is done without the knowledge of the employees, and taken outside the office.
It is impossible for the employers to be in full control no matter how much monitoring and snooping they conduct. To some extent they need to trust their employees, otherwise we are heading towards a scary society. And the trust needs to be mutual. To much monitoring will create a distrust amongst the employees as well. How efficient will the workers be with the disturbance of the feeling of constantly being watched? It is not difficult to imagine that focus on the work task at hand to some extent will be lost when one is in constant fear of doing something wrong.
