CASE ANALYSIS

Case analysis



Case analysis

Introduction

The use of surveillance cameras began as a way for business and government entities to maintain a consistent ability to monitor workplaces, warehouses and sensitive security areas. Advances in camera technology, including analog and digital recording devices, increased the use of surveillance cameras in many other areas of everyday life. In the process, surveillance cameras have raised legal issues concerning the right to go about daily life functions without being watched, especially when the abuse of surveillance cameras leads to an invasion of privacy.

Review of the case

Preventing internal theft, drug use and workplace violence; these are all valid reasons for using security cameras in the workplace. Such activities can cost your business plenty in terms of lost inventory, decreased productivity and injury. But while you are responsible to protect your company's bottom line, you also need to respect your staff's right to privacy. Checking up on employees is nothing new. The history of the labor market has been full of people whose primary responsibility is to check that people are working correctly - overseers, foremen, for example - but the rapidly evolving and interconnected digital technologies present significant challenges.

Back in 1998, Michael Ford's publication for the Institute of Employment Rights highlighted challenges, arguing that digital surveillance results in monitoring of workers that is "more widespread, more continuous, more intense and more secretive" (Ford 1998). The computing environment can now collect information that is more `context aware' (knowing not what we do, but when and where (Bristow et al. 2004)), and this creates new tensions in the balance between "the individual's need for privacy and corporate, government, and society's need for information" (York and Pendharkar 2004). Mobile and ambient technologies will introduce new dilemmas, for example "new business models will increase profits, possibly at the expense of safety margins; the balance of political and economic power could shift; economic developments will accelerate and initiate long-term changes in our social values and motives" (Bohn et al. 2005, p.21), and some argue that the embedding of technologies into our persona (worn computers, RFID chips in clothing for example), take us into a `posthuman' environment where "we are physically grounded but conceptually extended" by the information systems that tell us what to do (Pepperell 2005).

That said, consent and the embedding of technology does not in itself render us posthuman, and the Baja Beach Club in the UK now offers the possibility for VIPs to be microchipped (90 have had a chip embedded in their arm), so allowing them to "run a tab on a central computer, which they can check up on with a wave of the arm" (Purcell 2005).

The routing checking of employees also is nothing particularly new. Random bag searches by security staff at factory gates is one example, where any worker could be stopped and searched. That act did not require the `implied consent' of a worker, although it was a long way from the routine searching of every worker every time they walked out of the ...