cover image The Naked Employee: How Technology Is Compromising Workplace Privacy

The Naked Employee: How Technology Is Compromising Workplace Privacy

Frederick S. Lane, III. AMACOM/American Management Association, $24.95 (288pp) ISBN 978-0-8144-7149-4

Reading Lane's book is enough to make any employee paranoid. The attorney and author of Obscene Profits relentlessly lays out the many and varied ways employers legally spy on employees. Web surfing? Workers are being watched. E-mail? That, too. From video cameras to ID cards to background checks, employees' lives are basically open books to whoever is paying their salary. Lane's style is more clinical than impassioned, laying out the hard facts instead of editorializing. But readers may wish he would rant a bit more about all this 1984-style surveillance. His subjects range from computer forensics (whatever you delete isn't really deleted) to the routine monitoring of communications (""roughly one-half of all employers in this country periodically review their employees' e-mails""). To his credit, Lane does sum the book up with a defense of workplace privacy, urging Congress to get with the times. Without better federal legislation, he writes, this""intrusive examination of how we live our lives"" is bound to expand into every area of our existence.