Thursday, November 27, 2008

Loss of the Right to Privacy as a Trade-off

We all know how ICT has made the BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) industry possible, giving tens of thousands of Filipinos jobs in call centers all over the Philippines. While we are familiar with the many blessings ICT has bestowed upon us, I can’t help but wonder that there is surely a sacrifice that we had to make somewhere along the way.

One such sacrifice, I discovered, is the loss of the right to privacy, particularly in the workplace. This discovery was made in my days as a call center agent, when the company I worked for installed software that would allow management to record and monitor every stroke of the keyboard and every click of the mouse of every desktop computer in the office. Although management had assured us that the data gathered by the software would only be used to evaluate our performance and identify possible areas for improvement, I could not help but feel wary of the other uses of such an application. I don’t know if it’s just my nature to be suspicious, but it can’t escape my attention that the potential for abuse is huge, especially in the wrong hands.

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