New Delhi: The tribe of snoopy bosses is proliferating fast. As the phenomenon of leaking information from office spaces take menacing dimensions, the managements are often left with no other alternative but to spy on their employees.
The bosses today are not only playing peeking toms, their hawkish eyes are also monitoring personal communication of the employees. And if the need arise, they can even go to the extent of obtaining information about the private life of their employees.
Hewlett-Packard, the company ranked No. 11 in the Fortune 500, is currently facing the heat for snooping on the personal records of its employees.
It all started after CNET, an online technology site, published an article about the long-term strategy at HP last January. Although CNET did not reveal the name of its HP source, the information could only have come from a director. Fed up with ongoing media leaks, HP Chairwoman Patricia Dunn told another director that she wants to hunt down the source.
According to an internal HP email, Dunn authorised a team of independent electronic security experts to spy on the January 2006 communications of the 10 directors of the company. But what would later unleash a round of boardroom fury was the fact that Dunn had taken the decision without informing the rest of the board.
Not only were the calls and email records from HP itself examined, the calls from the directors’ homes and their private cellphones also came under the scanner. The corporate turmoil later came to light in documents obtained by Newsweek.
However, the Securities and Exchange Commission is still deciding whether or not to make the documents public.
While speculations were still rife, Dunn refused to comment on the issue. On May 18, at HP headquarters in Palo Alto, California, Dunn claimed she had found the 'leaker'. According to Tom Perkins, an HP director, Dunn revealed the surveillance scheme and named the offending director, who admitted to being the CNET leaker.
While apologising to his fellow directors, he said: “I would have told you all about this. Why didn’t you just ask?" That director was then asked to leave the boardroom, and he did so, according to Perkins.
What followed was a heated debate. Perkins, who claimed to have been the only director to take on Dunn directly, said he was enraged at the surveillance ordered by Dunn. He termed it as being illegal, unethical and a misplaced corporate priority on Dunn’s part.
After a divided board passed a motion asking the leaker to resign, Perkins announced his own resignation and walked out of the room. However, the HP case raises questions on the tactics used by security consultants to obtain personal information.
Another case of the management breaching the privacy of employees was when Australian Department of Human Services’ Centrelink agency admitted undertaking employee surveillance for the past year.
It revealed that it has been tracking staff to identify inappropriate access to customer records.
The surveillance led to the sacking of 24 staff members and the resignation of others under the Tax Administration Act (2000).
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