Ethical Issues in Electronic Communication

Technology enables businesses to communicate and store information more readily and efficiently than ever. However, as much as technology impacts the way that companies do business, it also raises important new issues for the employer-employee relationship.

Privacy in the Workplace

If you send personal emails from your office computer, do you have the right to expect that they’re private? Does your employer have a legal and ethical right to monitor what you are doing with company assets? In 2010, the Supreme Court addressed the issue of employee expectation of privacy. The case was about the extent to which the right to privacy applies to electronic communications in a government workplace and the city narrowly won. The Supreme Court has generally decided in favor of employers, giving them the right to monitor any communication that occurs on employer-owned equipment (e.g. computers, laptops, smartphones).

Social Media as a Screening Tool

Employers want to use technology to help them screen applicants and verify information about their workforce, which is understandable. What if the company believes that one of the quickest ways to gather information about an employee is through their social media accounts? An employer could always search for publicly available information on the internet. What if a company asked for your login password for platforms such as Facebook, X, Instagram, and LinkedIn so they could see information that is normally only visible to friends, family, and people you already have a relationship with? And if they did, is it legally and ethically justified?

While an employer asking for your social media or email login sounds overly intrusive, not all states have passed laws to ban employers from asking for this information. See if the state where you live has a law that protects employees or applicants from being asked.

Data Collection

The fact is that technology has put our information at the fingertips of businesses—there for the taking and, in some cases, the selling. Is it ethical for a business to collect data about a person and then sell that information to another business?  Many organizations collect data for their own purposes, but they also realize that your data has value to others. As a result, selling data has become an income stream for many organizations. Google, Meta (the parent company of Instagram and Facebook), and many other businesses track how you use their products and sell that information to advertisers interested in targeting their potential customer demographics.