Is this monitoring fair to customers and employees? Is it in the
public interest?
And what does this question have to do with the fact that companies
are monitoring their resources to ensure they are receiving the value
they pay for? If you call a company, on their telephones, and their
lines, what right to privacy do you think is inherrant in that? If it
was your personal telephone line and they called you, then you can
expect some privacy. If the company is monitoring that outbound call
and uses information disclosed on that call without a notice of
monitoring, then they are playing with the wiretap laws.
But when a notice that the call may be monitored "for quality control
or training purposes" is played and you do not object to that fact
when connected, then you have waived your right to privacy.
Having been the telecom manager for a large organization with several
hundred lines running through our PBX I will tell you the traffic on
all larger PBXes is monitored. We used call accounting software to
track all inbound and outbound calling. Outbound calls were priced
and if an employee was running up an inordinate amount of usage and /
or charges, it was brought to their direct manager's attention. When
you have people that do not normally perform customer facing tasks
running up hours of outbound usage, you have to wonder why they are
spending so much time on the telephone and not on their assigned
tasks. How about the person on the other end of the line? Are they
providing their employer with the effort for which they are being
compensated?
Monitoring of telephone calls on company facilities is not an invasion
of your privacy, it is an attempt to stop people from abusing their
employer from stealing both time and resources. When you look at it
in that light, it paints a completely different picture.
Justin Time (a_user2000@yahoo.com)