Florida International University Electronic Communications Privacy Act Paper

You are the CEO of Flower Power, Inc., a fast growing chain of 100 florist shops based in the Southeastern United States. The company opened for business 5 years ago with just 20 employees and now has over 1500 employees.

The company is now in the process of installing a new computer network, which will, for the first time, link all of the company’s offices and locations. The company’s Chief Information Officer has approached you with a proposal to include a number of electronic surveillance features in the new network.

The proposed features include:

-The ability of all MIS staff to view any employee emails at any time

-The ability of all MIS staff to monitor what internet sites employees are viewing at any time

-The ability of all MIS staff to “shadow” PCs of any employees, at any time, without the consent of those employees (“shadowing” allows a person, such as the MIS staff person, to monitor all a user’s activity on your PC from a remote location without the user’s knowledge)

-If a PC or laptop is issued for an employee’s use away from the office for work use, all email and activities on that PC or laptop can be monitored as well

-Cameras will be installed on PCs of every employee, allowing all MIS staff to monitor activities of every employee in their workspaces at any time.

-Your approval is needed to install this network and these features.

Instructions: Recommend one of the alternatives indicated in your answer to #3 and provide a rationale for your decision.

Question # 3 Alternative courses of action available to help mitigate the concerns of an over abuse of surveillance equipment could include modifying the suggested surveillance measures to exclude the use of video cameras and/or preventing monitoring of activities conducted away from the office. By excluding video monitoring capabilities employees could feel more at ease and less stressed about being monitored every second of the day. The only con to this would be the inability to see what the employee is doing while monitoring the screen. By reducing surveillance capabilities when the employee is using their computer away from work or during non-working hours, employees would feel their privacy rights are not being infringed upon. Their homes are their private places with conversations happening that do not need to be monitored by the company they work for. A con to removing this feature would be the possibility of an employee using this time of non-surveillance to perform unauthorized actions on the device.