Personally, I think monitoring is a good thing, as long as its conducted in a morally sanctioned way (many examples in the article are not). But as everything else, it has it pros and cons.
If I would be the boss of a small company, I think, and hope, that I would have developed a personal relation with my employees, enabling me to trust them too all extent, and therefore not needing any surveillance. If we are talking about a multinational cooperation with hundreds, maybe thousands, of employees I would have to say that monitoring is a thing I might use. If so, I wouldn’t monitor my employees after work hours, during lunch or breaks, but to some extent during their work hours. I would see to it that no social networks were available during work hours, but I would never monitor my employees phones or e-mails, unless my company was dealing with classified information or if we were developing a new product, that needed to be secret until it’s disclosed.
I wouldn’t use monitoring as a tool to maximize the profits of the company, like making sure my employees weren’t slacking in their cars etc, you have to have some trust.
One other thing I find very interesting is the storage of our virtual behavior. Google are storing our searches in order to make their search engine more effective, so that the users find what they need faster. But I think this is scary. Google knows what we searched for at any given time on any given day. This enables them to direct their searches and most and foremost direct their advertising. For example, being a student, I get money at the end of each month. Therefore the searches for online stores will increase from my computer, during this period of time. That way, Google knows that at the end of each month they can sell advertising spots for stores, and putting them as an eye-catcher, when I use their search engine. I think this gives them too much influence over our online behavior.
