The technological boom has provided advances in the business world that were never before dreamed possible. Today, with the click of a mouse one can email requests around the world, chat in real time with people who are hundreds or thousands of miles away and set up shipments without ever leaving the cubicle. With those advances, however, come issues of employee privilege that have never before been faced. Recent court cases have illuminated the fact that while employees have certain reasonable expectations of privacy when it comes to company-owned equipment and ideas he needs to be sure to display prudent care in what they do.
             When all is said and done, an employee has no right to privacy, reasonable or otherwise when it comes to the use of company equipment. This was recently tested and upheld by the Supreme Court when employees sued Hewlett Packard for hiring private investigators to uncover private phone records that were received and made from the company paid for equipment. In addition, the company won the right to view emails and chats that were logged on the company computers, often without the employee knowing that their online activities were being logged(Benderoff, 2006). "It's a very bad time to work if you care about privacy," said Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute, an offshoot of the American Civil Liberties Union. "Technology has made it possible to monitor everything you do and say while you are at work, and sometimes at home, and there are virtually no laws that prevent employers from doing this." Further, "no employer has ever been found liable violating the privacy rights of an employee by looking at e-mail," he said(Benderoff, 2006)."
             Concerns of business owners include fear that information is being leaked to competitors, available bandwidth availability for legitimate business because of employees watching videos on their company computer, and company liability issues because of em...