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Keystroke Loggers Save It, So Companies Can Peek Inside Employees' Heads
Please ignore cross-postings.
For those of you interested in privacy issues, there is a chilling front page
story
about keystroke monitoring software today's (7 Mar) Wall Street Journal, a
few
paras of which are quoted below. These tools permit organizations to record
every keystroke of every document, including the history of changes. It
isn't limited to email. In one of the examples, it was a work in progress --
a draft, reconstructed letter by letter, typos and all that resided only in
the creator's PC.
This story is potentially of interest to archives & RM professionals from a
totally different perspective, in that the very same technology that is used
to monitor employee use of computers in the workplace could also be used for
nobler purposes to automatically assign meta-tags to electronic records
according to document content, e.g., to associate the record with an
appropriate business process and schedule, and thus permit automated or
computer-assisted records disposition management actions. One can quickly
see that automated context analyzers, much needed for electronic records
purposes, will raise issues as to how such uses can be controlled in ways to
ensure reasonable protection of individual privacy. And also the question:
what is 'reasonable'?
In the US like most other countries, consumer protection laws always lag
well behind technology. As noted in this story, for example, while phone
tapping of phones is illegal, tapping into ones computer is not. Needless to
say, in today's global economy, many people work in multi-national companies
such as Exxon and several other large corporations that are reported in the
article as users of this
technology and are thus vulnerable in the absence of national or state laws
prohibiting such things.
Unfortunately, as chilling as this story is, it also reveals workplace abuses
that companies use to justify the necessity for such software, again raising
the question of balancing the right to privacy with the right to know.
Regards
Rick Barry
www.rbarry.com
And in another capacity that relates to this post:
Mid-Atlantic Director, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility
<www.cpsr.org>, a non-profit, public-interest alliance of computer
scientists, practitioners and users concerned about the social impact of
computer technology, financed mainly by dues from an increasingly
international membership base.
============================
Wall Street Journal
March 7, 2000
Thinking Out Loud
You Assumed 'Erase' Wiped Out That Rant Against the Boss? Nope
Keystroke Loggers Save It, So Companies Can Peek Inside Employees' Heads
By MICHAEL J. MCCARTHY
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
The American workplace has been put on notice that office computers can be
monitored. But who could have imagined the keystroke cops?
In a new threat to personal privacy on the job, some companies have begun
using surveillance software that covertly monitors and records each keystroke
an employee makes: every letter, every comma, every revision, every flick of
the fingertip, regardless of whether the data is ever saved in a file or
transmitted over a corporate computer network. As they harvest those bits and
bytes, the new programs, priced at as little as $99, give employers access to
workers' unvarnished thoughts -- and the potential to use that information
for their own ends.
….
The Investigator program is designed to be covert. It doesn't show up as an
icon on the screen, and is hard to find among computer files even when
someone specifically searches for it. It is usually installed on a worker's
computer after hours, but it can also be disguised in an e-mail attachment
for an unsuspecting employee to download as an "upgrade."
Recently, however, Mr. Eaton has added an onscreen notice, informing the user
that the PC could be monitored -- an alert a systems manager can choose to
have automatically displayed or not. "If your purpose is to humiliate them,
then don't tell them," Mr. Eaton says. "If you want to stop abuse, tell them.
Usually the threat alone is enough."
Once Investigator is installed, the computer manager can choose "alert" words
like "boss" or "union" or specific names. Then any time they appear in the
text of an e-mail, note or memo, those documents will be automatically
e-mailed over a company's computer network to the employee's supervisor or
other designee. (On a stand-alone computer, the document would have to be
retrieved directly from the hard drive.)
….
"When else can you peer into someone's raw thought process?" asks Peter A.
Steinmeyer, a lawyer at Epstein Becker & Green in Chicago who has studied
Internet and privacy issues and who represents management clients.
Nonetheless, he says, while an employee may try to argue that he reasonably
expected his "draft" thoughts to remain his own, courts have consistently
held that communications written on company-provided computers aren't private
under current law.
....
Aside from keystroke logging, the desktop-monitoring software can be
programmed to send to a manager's screen via e-mail a replica of precisely
what is on an employee's screen at any given moment -- text, graphics and
all. Adavi says it has big corporate clients, but that they are adamant in
their refusal to be identified.
....
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