Annotated Bibliography

Einsberg, Daniel. “Eyeing the Competition.” TIME. 14 Mar. 1999.
This article gives different examples of competition companies stealing information. Includes important measures which the FBI, companies and lawyers are taking to try and prevent competitive stealing.
This article is helpful to my paper because it allowed me to be able to give current examples of cases and active law suits against individuals, as well as companies, about competition disputes. It includes some interesting statistics about the FBI and how much is actually ‘stolen’ from United States corporations.


Forelle, Charles. “Ivy Imbroglio: Princeton Admits It Spied on Yale Admissions Site.” The Wall Street
Journal. 26 July 2002.
Report on Princeton University’s dean and director of admissions Stephen LeMenager accessing confidential information about their rival school, Yale University. The article discusses the procedures that were taking after Princeton admitted the intrusion and invasion of privacy.
This article is helpful in my paper because it is a prime example of accessing confidential information not only about Yale University but also about the students whose applications were studied. It helps make you realize that even if you think something is confidential there could possibly someone out there who can use it against you.


658.302H833v2006. Howard, Gillian. Vetting and Monitoring Employees, A Guide for HR Practitioners.
Burlington: Gower, 2006.
This book explains the laws and regulations regarding employers’ rights to monitor emails, phone class, etc. It discusses specific parts of the laws that allow employers’ and/or employees’ to do certain things that are considered legal. It points out some of the common mistakes and misunderstanding people perceive from the regulation laws of the workplace.
This book is useful in my paper because it is my main source of information about telephone monitoring and the regulations that go along with it. It includes some of the ways in which phone calls that have been recorded are later used. Also, it helps with my plan of solving some of the trust issues within companies.


Nord, G. Daryl, Tipton F. McCubbins and Jeretta Horn Nord. “E-Monitoring in the Workplace: PRIVACY,
LEGISLATION, AND SURVEILLANCE SOFTWARE.” Communications of the ACM. 15.8.
(2006): 73-77.
This article gives interesting and useful statistics companies throughout the world monitoring their employees and the ways in which they do so. Also, included are statistics about what the employers are monitoring from computers and how the monitoring has increased in the past six years. There is a list of the different types of surveillance capabilities of monitoring software in the world today.
This article is useful for my paper to help me show how certain techniques have increased and become more strict over the years. Also, the statistics will help get the point across and show people how it really affects many companies throughout the United States.


ProQuest. “Spying on employees banned.” ProQuest. 75.10. (2005): 1.
This article defines and discusses The Workplace Surveillance Act of 2005. It explains the means of the law and places it extends to as well. It briefly talks about the act in which it replaced.
This article is useful in my paper because I used it in trying to come up with a logical way to decide what terms and conditions should apply for surveillance of employees’. It is useful also because of the details and discussion it goes into about The Workplace Surveillance Act of 2005.


Sherman, Marc A. “Webmail at Work: The Case for Protection Against Employer Monitoring.”
This document gives some of the primary reasons why employers’ choose to monitor their employees’. It goes in depth about the resources and information about their company that they are trying to protect from outsiders. It explains some of the problems that can be caused if certain confidential information gets in to the hands of the wrong person, or a competitor. Also, included is some of the software that companies use in order to monitor and keep track of the activities of their employees’, especially on PC’s.
This document is useful in my paper because it helps me to explain more in detail the reasons why companies feel the need to monitor their employees’ communications so much. Also, it helped me get a better understanding and made me able to explain a little about The Electronic Communications Privacy Act.


Swartz, Nikki. “Companies Spying on Employees.” ProQuest. 41.1. (2007): 1.
This article consist strictly of statistics about what companies monitor, track content sent by and received by an employee, or retain and review all e-mails.
This article helps my introduction entice people by giving some statistics on a survey that was conducted just two years ago and expressed some percentages about Internet and e-mail monitoring.


Yoon, Suh-kyung. “I’ve got my eye on you.” ProQuest:Far Eastern Economic Review. 164.19. (2001): 1.
This review explains a little about the surveillance issues in Hong Kong and how some of the things those employers’ can do to invade your privacy is illegal for police or any government official. It also talks a little about Hong Kong’s Personal Data Privacy Ordinance, which is where they draw some boundaries as to what employers’ can get in to.
This article helps me compare the difference between the restrictions on employee monitoring in the United States verses the restrictions in Hong Kong. For example, in Hong Kong employers are allowed to monitor and invade their employees’ privacy more than the police legally can.

Research Plan

I’m using a variety of articles from magazines and newspapers in order to bring to the publics’ attention some of the ways in which competing businesses throughout the world try to “steal” their competitors’ confidential information. The articles that I have used in my research all contain different statistics and recent incidents from all over the world. Some of the articles I have reviewed consist of legal actions that competing companies act upon even though they are extremely unethical.

Problem:
• Companies tailing competitor employees
o Companies hire secret people to dig through some employees trash cans outside of their homes in order to get customer lists, policies, benefits, etc. about their competition.
 Source: “Snoops” Business Week from October 9, 2006
• Making phone calls and expressing a false identity
o Companies make phone calls to employees or customers of their competition to try to squeezing some useful information out of them.
• Reading through e-mails or other confidential documents and/or employees taking this information with them
o In some cases, past employees take very confidential and important information with them when they leave one job for another job in the same field.
 Source: 45% of Employees Take Data When They Change Jobs www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_pwwi/is_200705/ai_n19162742/print
o An instance at Yale University where an associate dean and director of admissions, Stephen LeMenager, was accessing confidential Internet records to see whether its rival had admitted or rejected students who had applied to both schools.
 Source: Ivy imbroglio: Princeton Admits It Spied on Yale Admissions Site

• Filtering organizations or businesses
• Video taping workers without their permission
o Recently cell phones with camera capabilities are becoming a problem and being banned from some places of work for protective reasons.
 Source: “The dim view of camera phones” in the Indianapolis Star on August 15, 2004
Solution:
• Inform as many people as possible about the risk within competing businesses
• Warn people about some of the things companies might try to pull on them in order to get important information from them, in sneaky ways
• In order to stop “spies” from finding any useful information in employees or company trash every company should have a policy where they have to shred everything before it leaves the building
o Also, delete all information from computers once it’s no longer needed
• Monitor all employee interactions with other businesses whether a competing company or a vendor
o Keep good records of all employees’ computers and emails


I have researched this topic thoroughly because I want to make myself more aware of the lengths that people will go to in order to ‘beat out’ the competition. Also, want to make other people aware of these tactics in case they haven’t heard of any of the cases I have presented.