In the first post of a two-part series, employment law attorney Robert L. Bailey examines how technology enables employers (and anyone else) to track what others are doing on the Web and if that is even a good idea.

If a gadget uses electricity, chances are pretty good that it has a greater role to play than you might think in helping — or possibly hurting — your interests as an employer. Monitoring your employees’ use of workplace computers is an obvious starting place. But people also leave electronic footprints on the Internet — in and out of the office. Our five billion cell phones allow us to make phone calls, but they also function as portable audio and video recorders and players, cameras, hard drives, Internet browsers, e-mail boxes, WiFi routers, and GPS units.

Security cameras, ID badges, radio frequency identification tags — even toll-road payment and vehicle traffic surveillance systems — can track the location of assets and people. Printers, fax machines, copiers, and scanners that read and print out documents also contain computers that generate and record metadata about who used them and when, and hard drives retain permanent — and retrievable — images of those documents.

So what’s a careful employer to do? read more…