Carpe Diem: Privacy Protection in Employment Act

Abstract

What these employees have in common is that their employers technologically monitored them, invading their privacy, yet their lawsuits were dismissed.6 Indeed, scholars generally agree that the law in the United States fails to adequately protect private sector employees from technological monitoring by their employers.7 This article proposes a solution: federal legislation intended to permit private sector employers to monitor their employees when necessary but to also provide their employees adequate privacy protection.8 Section II reviews the nature and extent of the problem of technological monitoring of employees by their employers. Section III surveys the laws and proposed legislation that serve as a foundation for the Proposed Act and articulates the strengths and weaknesses of the various approaches in comparison to that of the Proposed Act. Section IV illustrates how the Proposed Act flows from but is different than the prior work of scholars addressing the issue