Web commentators have noted that increased monitoring of office communications may be turning the new age of high tech into a "dark age of innovation".

Indeed, many office workers are wondering nowadays whether 2005 is really 1984.

Is this electronic hyperbole or fact?

A review of online surveys would seem to indicate that the people who own the machines increasingly want to know what those using them are uploading, downloading, or emailing — and for good reason, as it affects their bottom line. In fact, studies show that many workers are surfing, blogging, gaming, shopping, booking travel, viewing "entertainment" sites, checking investments, or even gambling — activities that aren’t necessarily part of their job descriptions or contributing to profits. Clearly, employers have good reason to want to know whether their employees are working or playing on the job — but where is the line between privacy and responsibility to the company?

According to one survey, more than 70 per cent of adult Internet users in the United States have accessed the Internet at work for personal use at least once, while 76 per cent of companies monitor workers’ web site connections. If the Internet is the great leveller of global communications, and is "globalising" information management, it is equally egalitarian when it comes to how it affects employees — whatever their status in the hierarchy. Emails to "friends" have cost some CEOs their jobs, while misuse of emails for "bad behaviour" or personal reasons has caused a great many more employees to lose theirs.

The 2005 Electronic Monitoring and Surveillance Survey released in conjunction with The ePolicy Institute and the American Management Association (AMA) found that in order to "motivate" compliance, 26 per cent of the 526 US companies surveyed had fired workers for misusing the Internet and another 25 per cent had terminated employees for email misuse. So, from top to bottom, employees and employers who think they can use email or IT with impunity are beginning to think again. Increasingly, people are finding that somewhere, somehow, unbeknownst to them, someone is or may be monitoring their online activities, emails, or keystrokes; listening to or recording their calls; or even monitoring their movements and identities.

So, is workplace privacy at risk? Should there even be workplace privacy? Where does one draw the line between what is acceptable and unacceptable when using high-tech equipment provided by the office? Who "owns" the devices you use and the information you process? These and other questions are receiving new attention as public versus private communicating becomes a predominant issue in the world of work.

The stakes are huge: one survey, carried out by a US company that produces software for monitoring employees’ computer and phone activities, quotes independent research saying IT managers will face the management of 35 million remote users of the Internet this year, with 14 billion devices on the Internet by 2010. The company also estimates the cost of all this online time at $138 billion in the US alone, based on Internet use of some 53 million employees.

The result is that managers are increasing the monitoring in some workplaces of employee communicating, mostly in the industrialised world. The 2005 AMA survey bears this out. Of those 526 US companies surveyed, 76 per cent keep tabs on their employees’ use of email, telephone, and the Internet. Roughly 65 per cent use specialised software to block connections to web sites deemed "inappropriate" by company or organisation IT departments. Furthermore, 36 per cent of employers track content, keystrokes, and time spent at the keyboard, 50 per cent store and review employee computer files, and 55 per cent retain and review employees messages.

Still, most employers are "doing a good job of notifying employees when they are being watched", the AMA says, with 80 per cent actually informing employees their every "e-move" is under scrutiny, 82 per cent letting employees know the company stores and reviews computer files, 86 per cent alerting employees to email monitoring, and 89 per cent notifying employees that their web usage is being tracked. "Workers, email, IM, blogs, and Internet content create written business records that are the electronic equivalent of DNA evidence," said Nancy Flynn, Executive Director of The ePolicy Institute.

A number of companies surveyed admitted to using emerging technologies to monitor employee performance and activity. Some use such new technologies to monitor employee identity.

Five per cent use global positioning satellite (GPS) software to monitor cell phones, 8 per cent to track company vehicles, and 8 per cent to monitor employees IDs. More slow to be adopted are biometric devices such as finger scans (5 per cent), facial recognition (2 per cent), and iris scans (0.5 per cent).

The 2004 Workplace Email and IM Survey by the AMA and The ePolicy Institute revealed that one in five employers has had email subpoenaed by courts and regulators and another 13 per cent have battled workplace lawsuits triggered by employees email.

"Privacy in today’s workplace is largely illusory," says one expert. "In this era of open-space cubicles, shared desk space, networked computers, and teleworkers, it is hard to realistically hold on to a belief of private space. Work is carried out on equipment belonging to employers who have a legal right to the work product of the employees using it".

Indeed, making sure that equipment provided to the employee is used for work instead of personal communication or outright play is of increasing concern to employers. A world-wide survey of chief information security officers conducted by CIO Magazine and PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2004, The Global State of Information Security, indicated that appropriate use of the Internet (46 per cent), appropriate use of email (56 per cent), user administration (69 per cent), network security administration (55 per cent), and system security administration (52 per cent) were most frequently included in their security policies. The study was based on responses from more than 8,000 IT security professionals from 62 countries.

While some employers may understandably be concerned over the time and profits lost to the Internet or through private use of company communications capabilities, employees argue that contrary to good intentions, workplace monitoring has the potential to adversely affect the bottom line by stunting employee productivity and creating lower morale and increased job stress. A random workplace survey conducted in 2004 by Scotland’s Public Service Union of 230 members mostly from the private sector showed the overall impact of monitoring on employees themselves negatively affected their productivity. More than half of respondents regarded the practice as "demeaning and stress inducing" and claimed to suffer from anxiety, and 17 per cent suffered from depression. Other responses to employee monitoring included loss of sleep and extended absence due to sickness.

But how far is too far? Recent high-profile cases involving top executives indicate that authorities are beginning to watch the watchers. For example, the former chief executive of a large telecom company in Finland and four other former employees were recently found guilty of violating privacy laws by ordering employees’ phone calls and emails to be tracked.

Sometimes, those at the top may also pay a price for monitoring people lower down the corporate ladder. The classic example is the case of a high-profile CEO in the US who recently lost his job for sending explicit emails to a female colleague with whom he was presumed to have a special relationship — not because of the affair but because the inappropriate language contained in the emails violated the company’s conduct code.