While your office computer is a great tool for getting work done, it can also be your worst enemy. When it comes to your company's computer, you should always assume that Big Brother is watching because it's easy to do and extremely common.
If you want to stay out of trouble at the office, the rule is that the company owns the computer, it can look at everything on it whenever it wants and further, can do this even if you have a private password.
Are you getting the picture? You have no rights. It's not your machine. If you borrowed the boss's car, would you complain when she looked in her own trunk and found your private things there?
Of course, with the car, you could put private things in the trunk while you're borrowing the car, remove them when you're done and the boss would never know they had been there. With a computer, you should not assume that this scenario works.
A computer is the ultimate recording device. With the right monitoring software, your company can even record your keystrokes for posterity. (Just think - your keystrokes in the Smithsonian.)
Even deleting doesn't work because you should assume that your company could recover your deleted data. From a technical perspective, recovering deleted data is not rocket science. It's called buy the right inexpensive software and you too can recover deleted data.
Your company has so much latitude when it comes to monitoring your behavior at the office, if it wanted to break the law, it would almost have to try. Some easy ways for a company to cross the line would be to do things like inappropriately placing a camera in the rest room (I feel certain that your common sense knows where inappropriate is), surreptitiously recording your conversations with co-workers and tapping your telephone.
Interestingly, the secret recording of voices is something the law tends to not like, while videotaping without voices is usually okay. Coming back to your computer data, it's a legal free for all with the company usually the winner.
If you're the company, don't take what I've said so far as permission to abuse your employee's privacy. While the law may not penalize you, you still need to be concerned about morality, ethics - and employee morale.
I think that you can balance these conflicting interests and concerns by adopting a Computer Use Policy for your company. If you want to maximize your legal right to monitor computer activity, I think you put yourself on the correct side of the law, ethics and morality, by clearly telling your employees precisely what it is you do monitor and how you expect them to properly use the computers.
Don't use your computer system as a trap for the unwary. Train your folks on your version of appropriate use and warn them that you are watching. In this way, you've protected your company against the consequences of your employees doing improper things on the computer while not trampling on their expectations of privacy.
While the law may not require a Computer Use Policy and training, I don't think it's good business to use the minimal standard the law requires as the way you want to run your business. Unless of course, employee morale is irrelevant to you.
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