Where work ends and private life begins: the fading technological divide

In an article ('Private eyes are watching you') last Sunday, I alluded to the harvesting of personal digital data by social network sites and other technologies.

These data are a source of economic value for sites like Facebook and Google, which use contextual advertising - directing advertising to consumers/users based on their Internet usage patterns.

The abundance of data accumulated by these and other sites gives rise to privacy concerns. These privacy concerns are by no means limited to Internet sites, as employers (enterprises) are also using ICT to accumulate data on staff, and the use of some of these technologies have become so intrusive that they blur the line between work time and personal time.

One of the perks offered by organisations is a smartphone. In Jamaica, the default smartphone is a BlackBerry, and more often than not you are in a closed user group (CUG). The CUG allows persons within a predefined user group to make and receive unlimited calls within the same group. Persons within the group, if they are on a data plan, will also share BlackBerry Messenger, and emails are automatically sent to your mailbox, day or night or weekends.

Some persons feel compelled to respond to mails when sent, and in some organisations the approach is that you are always on call, despite the nature of your job. The carmaker Volkswagen has agreed to stop its BlackBerry servers sending emails to some of its employees when they are off-shift. The carmaker confirmed that it made the move following complaints that staff's work and home lives were becoming blurred.

Will Hutton from The Work Foundation, a research body at Lancaster University, which explores the world of work from socio-economic issues, commented: "It's bad for the individual worker's performance being online and available 24/7. You do need downtime; you do need periods in which you can actually reflect on something without needing instantaneously to give a reaction."

Besides blurring the work-home life divide, some organisations have their own BlackBerry enterprise server (BES), which is really a software. The BES offers amazing security, control and convenience, including remote lock and password change for your phone, software upgrades and email synchronisation.

The BES also allows the enterprise to operate as a Big Brother, being able to log and view all activities you have done on your phone. The enterprise ability to monitor and track also includes content- or web-filtering software. Essentially, web-filtering software is used to block what the enterprise may consider inappropriate content and monitor web access.

productivity issues

Companies correctly justify the use of content filtering software based on bandwidth usage (e.g. downloading of MP3 files), incessant online shopping, productivity issues and the viewing of porn. Data from Sex Tracker helps to justify this last point, noting that 70 per cent of all Internet porn occurs during workday hours.

Conversely, the tracking software also gives the organisation the ability to monitor all sites you access, view all files you viewed, and depending on the presence of encryption, view all text that you write, regardless of the website.

Another technology that is increasingly being used for monitoring and tracking by companies, large and small, and households is closed-circuit television (CCTV). The price of these systems is no longer prohibitive. At PriceSmart, for example, you can purchase a simple system with one camera for approximately $6,000.

It is difficult to tell how pervasive the technology is in Jamaica. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that it is widely used, and organisations seldom indicate to staff or to customers that they are being monitored.

All modern cities use CCTV liberally. The city of London, for instance, has more than 500,000 CCTV. (Jamaicans going to the Olympics, please behave.)

Continuing from the enterprise perspective, there are other ways that you are monitored: your company telephone system is likely to have the ability to record every incoming and outgoing call, use of a coded access card to get into the office in the mornings, electronic health cards, company credit cards, Advance cards, and the list goes on.

The truth is, there is no privacy, and the assumption or the reality is that gathering and processing personal data is vital to contemporary living. However, when new technologies create new managerial capabilities and change the business operating environment, should old rules of behaviour continue to apply - or should new capabilities require new policies?

Organisations operate on the maxim that whatever staff do at work using company property is the property of the company. However, the definition of 'at work' has changed; you don't need to be physically at work to be 'at work'.

All this brings rise to new managerial issues. Have organisations updated their acceptable-use policy, especially as it relates to CUG, and the use of social networks? Have organisations updated and made staff aware of their data policy, specifying how the collected/accumulated data can and can't be used by the organisation? If the organisation accumulates electronic data, what right to access or view do staff have? To whom should the data be made available, and what right of non-disclosure does the employee have, especially after he has left the company?

'Big Data'

At the recent meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, one of the concepts de jour was 'Big Data'. McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) defines big data as datasets whose size is beyond the ability of typical database software tools to capture, store, and analyse. The definition is intentionally nebulous and incorporates a moving definition of how big a dataset needs to be in order to be considered Big Data.

But what is the source of Big Data? Social networks, cellphones, Internet traffic, smart energy meters, motor vehicles, radio-frequency identification sensors. The list goes on. IDC, a technology research firm, indicates that data are growing at 50 per cent per year, which means that worldwide data double every two years.

MGI provides data indicative of the growth of Big Data: it costs US$600 to buy a disk drive that can store all of the world's music. There were five billion mobile phones in use in 2010, and 30 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook every month. The general view is that Big Data provides a new frontier for innovation, competition and productivity.

The WEF also cautioned that consensus is needed within society on how to use this data in terms of privacy restrictions, misuse, civil liberties and appropriate access. Employers should be proactive and start to set their own organisations privacy standards.

Dr Paul Golding, associate professor, dean, College of Business and Management, University of Technology, Jamaica. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and pgolding@utech.edu.jm.