I was working as a marketing representative with a start-up company that was manufacturing detergents two years ago. The marketing manager was my friend on Facebook and followed me on Twitter. I did not know she was monitoring me until one Monday in the office when she came straight to my desk and surprisingly said to me, “You must have had fun over the weekend from those pictures you posted on online. It is not time to focus on your work and forget about the weekend.” I was very stunned at her words and I did not utter any word. It was only later after logging into my Facebook account that I realized she had liked and commended on all the posts I had during the weekend, after having a birthday party for my nephew. It is from this when I realized that the manager had been monitoring me off job because she was stalking me. She did not want me in the job in the first place, as she had initially complained that I was too inexperienced for the job.
I would consider my case as a moderate privacy. She was just going through my Facebook posts as my friend on Facebook, and I would not consider it as a severe invasion ( Acquisti, Brandimarte & Loewenstein, 2015) . However, I think it is wrong to take it personal when someone posts something on social media and want to make it an issue at the office, especially when you do not like them ( Benn, 2017).
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I think the manager was monitoring me off job because she simply did not like me and she wanted me out of the company, which she eventually succeeded. An ethical perspective which could be applied to this situation is the concept of reciprocal obligation, which holds that, while the employee is obligated to respect the property and goals of the employer, the employer holds reciprocal obligation to respect the rights of workers, including the worker’s right to privacy ( Hartman, DesJardins & MacDonald, 2008) . From an employee’s viewpoint, the employee’s right to privacy can be looked through the Privacy Respecting Theory, which “holds that the right to privacy is foundational to most or all other human or non-human rights, a right the violation of which is a violation of the agent in question” ( Corlett, 2002).
References
Acquisti, A., Brandimarte, L., & Loewenstein, G. (2015). Privacy and human behavior in the age of information. Science , 347 (6221), 509-514.
Benn, S. I. (2017). Privacy, freedom, and respect for persons. In Privacy and personality (pp. 1- 26). Routledge.
Corlett, J. A. (2002). The nature and value of the moral right to privacy. Public Affairs Quarterly , 16 (4), 329-350.
Hartman, L. P., DesJardins, J. R., & MacDonald, C. (2008). Business ethics: Decision making for personal integrity and social responsibility . Burr Ridge, IL: McGraw-Hill.
