Despite increasing supervisor surveillance, more than half of the workers polled in a new survey by job-information Web site Vault.com said they're unconcerned about employers reading their e-mail.
Rather than indicate indifference to e-mail privacy, the survey shows that employees are increasingly separating their personal messages from their business correspondence, said Rob Birgfeld, a spokesman for Vault.com.
"People really aren't abusing their office e-mail as much, in terms of stuff that can be held against them," he said.
Seventy-nine percent of respondents in the survey said that they keep a private e-mail account - through services such as Microsoft's Hotmail or Yahoo - separate from their business account, he said. Eighty-three percent of those polled said they regularly delete their e-mail, according to the survey.
When asked, "Are you worried about your employer monitoring your e-mails?" - 58% of the 1,004 workers surveyed (by e-mail) said no.
However, keeping a personal e-mail account may not be enough to protect employee privacy, said Joel Reidenberg, a law professor at the Fordham University School of Law in New York.
"Employees need to know the policies in place at work about what's appropriate for e-mail, and whether or not their employer is watching them," he said.
There are various ways for bosses to monitor workers, Reidenberg said. Supervisors can use software to track the keystrokes of employees at their desks, or sift through the Web pages employees browse at work by looking at the cache files stored on the company server.
Nearly three-quarters of major U.S. firms say they record and review employees' phone calls, e-mail, Internet connections and computer files, according to an annual American Management Association Electronic Monitoring and Surveillance survey released in April. The management survey reported that the rate of surveillance has doubled since 1997.
Vault.com, in New York, can be reached at 212-366-4212, or at www.vault.com/.
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