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The Rights & Wrongs Of E-mail Monitoring|
- By Julia Fernandes, Jul 30, 2004 0000 hrs IST
- Tags : email, IM
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E-mail today has undoubtedly emerged as one of the most vital forms of communication for businesses. With increasing scams and internal frauds plaguing enterprises all across the globe, has e-mail monitoring become a necessary evil?
According to a recent Forrester survey conducted among North American organizations, 52% of all companies monitored external mail of their employees with the aid of software monitoring tools.
The alacrity with which financial scams occur, would Indian CIOs deploy such technology? CXO searches for answers.
"Yes," affirms Ishwar Jha- head-information systems of Sony Music India. "Every organization should decide as to how morally high and controlled environment they want to run. Many harassment and other litigations have been noticed recently due to misuse of email. As a matter of fact, enterprises need to address the issue before this email-based communication hampers their reputation and causes serious harm to their companies," warns Jha.
"No," shrugs KG Mohan, vice president- information technology, Hindustan Lever Ltd. Mohan does not see it as a major issue and in fact rates it as an avoidable overhead, reasoning that it cannot take on the responsibility of tracking all mails.
But, Sundaram Appan, advisor information technology and CIO of Power Products Division of Hindustan Motors (HM-PPD) has a different take on this. Sharing an interesting observation Appan stated, "Email definitely affects employee productivity since 50% to 60% of emails are personal in nature. And this in turn negatively affects 30% to 40% of precious office and employee productivity."
Providing a CEO's perspective is S.K. Hazra- managing director, Aegis Logistics. Says Hazra, "Generally speaking, staff and officers working in a company are supposed to utilize their office facilities for official work. Email monitoring becomes necessary only to ensure that there is no leakage of information to competitors. In fact, since I deem it to be a part of the company's data security, I would surely consider acquiring this kind of software after checking its effectiveness."
In May this year, Legato Software had launched a solution in India called EmailXtender, a centralized data storage and retrieval system that automatically moves data off the email message server into an archival system, capturing and indexing all incoming and outgoing mails, including Instant Messages (IM).
Justifying the efficacy of this solution was PK Gupta, director - strategic development intercontinental operations, Legato Software. He said, "Our solutions comply with US regulations such as SEC 17 A-3/4 and NASD (National Association of Security Dealers) 3010. In fact, financial institutions, especially those Indian companies listed at Nasdaq and NYSE have to comply with these regulations."
Agrees Jha, "Email is today considered and recognized as a legal form of communication. With US regulations entering the scene, email monitoring has become inevitable."
According to Gupta, though several corporates, especially PSUs, have evinced keen interest in the solution till now, imparting education and awareness about data privacy to staff in the senior management cadre is more important.
But what about employee's privacy rights issues? When CIOs were questioned whether such monitoring tools tantamount to an invasion of an employee's privacy rights, almost all of them agreed in unison that this does not amount to stepping on an employee's private space.
Reasoned Jha, "Enterprise emails are meant for the purpose of business communication. Most of the organizations have in place policy documents that discourages employees to use enterprise email infrastructure for personal communication."
"Employers want to be sure their employees are doing a good job, but employees don't want their every sneeze or trip to the water cooler logged. That's the essential conflict of workplace monitoring," according to
The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (PRC), a California-based nonprofit consumer information and advocacy program offering consumers a platform to protect their personal privacy.
But what does the Indian law have to say on this?
Explains Dr. BB Singh, Advocate and scientific advisor of the Bombay High Court, "The Information Technology Act 2000, Sec. 43 provides for damages on unlawful retrieval of computer data and other information therefrom without permission of the owner or the person who is incharge of a computer, or computer system or computer network. In the instant case one has to consider who is the "owner" or who is the "incharge" of the computer system provided to its employees as stipulated in the Act."
He continued, "In many organizations, employees have only limited rights. Hence the company can monitor any messages, data, information coming to or going out of its set-up. The question of infringement of the privacy of employees of the company has to be judged from the circumstances on case-to-case basis."
Recollecting from the past, Singh stressed, "In the United Nations when I was working during the late 70s and when IT was not what is it today, all written communications of all employees on the official address were first opened by the Central Registry Office, carefully read and then sent to the recipient with copies to all other who may be concerned with it directly or remotely."
"Although "right to privacy" has not been specifically identified under the Constitution, the 7 Judges Bench of the Supreme Court of India in Kharak Singh v/s State of U.P. (AIR 1963 SC 1295) held that right to privacy is a part of right to life and personal liberty enshrined under Art. 21 of Constitution of India," concluded Singh.
According to a school of thought, while employees should be more responsible and should not misuse the official resources, employers too are expected not to gatecrash into a person's mailbox, but rather put in place some kind of Employee Privacy Policies, which should be mutually binding and acceptable to both the sides.
Though a utopian thought, policy-based monitoring of emails appears to be the only mid-resolution to satisfy both employers and their employees.
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