Subject: [extropy-chat] Oz State to ban bosses snooping on emails

From: Damien Broderick <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 04 May 2005 16:36:12 -0500

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/printpage/0,5942,15183112,00.html

by Simon Hayes
05may05

EMPLOYERS will face criminal charges if they illegally spy on workers' 
emails under legislation introduced in NSW parliament yesterday.

NSW is the first state to move on "tech snooping", with Victoria and South 
Australia understood to be considering similar legislation. [etc] 

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From: "Brett Paatsch" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 May 2005 11:52:41 +1000

Interesting.

I wonder if employers would simply alter the employment agreements such that 
accepting surveilance of email or the employers right to (contractually 
rather than legally) would become a condition of employment.

This is an interesting issue because I can see both sides and so what will 
ultimately decide what shakes out will be how people react politically. 
Employers could have legitimate grounds for wanting to have some surveilance 
capability in some circumstances.

The idea of providing with a job the necessary tools to do that job did not 
traditionally automatically include giving employees the right to use those 
same tools for their own purposes or convenience.  The employee/employer 
master/servant relationship seems to be shifting in this case in a direction 
towards employee/servant empowerment. It will be interesting to see if the 
trend can gather any political steam.

Personally I would have suspected that laws would have tended to develop to 
favour the employers rather than employees in this area because employees 
would not be politically well organised enough to oppose the shift towards 
greater surveilance of their activities. I'd have thought that most 
employees would not object to clauses being placed in employment contracts 
etc.. Perhaps they will. Perhaps I am wrong.

Brett Paatsch