Ethics: The Rights and Wrongs of Workplace Snooping

Employers have a number of reasons to consider monitoring employee email—more than two million of them, if you ask Chevron Corporation. Recently, the San Francisco‐based oil company was required to pay four plaintiffs a total of $2.2 million after their attorneys found email evidence of sexual harassment. The attorneys had found a smoking gun when they located, on Chevron's own email server, an email message that had been sent to a number of people within the company containing a list of jokes about “why beer is better than women.” Had Chevron been monitoring its employees' email, it might have seen the problem coming.