In July the Regulation and Investigatory Powers Act was passed. It said employers could read employees' emails, but only with their consent. But in October Department of Trade and Industry guidelines gave employers the right to monitor emails without asking first. Some companies are even going so far as to introduce 'Spywear' technology, which monitors every key stroke and mouse click an employee makes. It enables bosses to trawl through the text of every email sent or received, every web page viewed, looking for large expanses of flesh tones or simply colourful language.
Employers can also flip to what is on any employee's screen at any time.
Companies insist the crackdown is necessary because staff are wasting time by surfing the internet and sending emails. Without saying where they get their figures, they claim 60 per cent of online shopping and 90 per cent of hits on pornographic sites are in office hours. They also argue that they are responsible for the content of any messages sent out on their networks. As recently as a year ago it did not seem to matter much what employers looked at. Email and the internet were still in their relative infancy but over the past year there has been an explosion in e-traffic.