A reader writes VentureBeat asking if it’s okay to install surveillance cameras to watch employees after a rash of trade secret thefts in the office.

The answer?

Proceed with caution.

4 Kinds of Surveillance

There are generally four kinds of employee related surveillance explains Curtis Smolar, a lawyer representing small businesses and start-ups:

1. Work Related Data:  Usually acceptable and generally non-invasive, this monitoring type relates to on-the-job employee performance.
2. Computer Data:  Potentially the most invasive type of monitoring, protect yoruself by making sure that your employee handbook states that this data is not private.
3. Video Monitoring:  Coinsidered very invasive by employees and often rife with gray areas, notification of a company policy might prove acceptable.
4. Audio Recording:  Possibly illegal in many states,

At a TedXObserver event in London last month author, activist, journalist, and blogger Cory Doctorow gave a talk outlining the ways we’re undervaluing our privacy in an era of full disclosure and 24/7 surveillance and asks the question:

“How do we get kids to care about online privacy?”

Doctorow states that Facebook uses “powerful game like mechanisms to reward disclosure” comparing it to B.F. Skinner’s theory of using social reinforcement to strengthen a desired behavior – Like giving away information.

Making Facebook Less Creepy

Parents and schools will spy on everything in the attempt to keep them safe but this may groom them for an existence where constant internet surveillance is considered legitimate, normal, and good “teaching them to systematically undervalue their privacy years before …

Imagine you’ve been detained as a suspected terrorist.  Only you’re a U.S. citizen, a university professor, and have a valid passport.

The U.S. terrorist watch list – the party that’s too easy to get invited to, and too hard to leave even when you don’t belong.  But that’s where Hasan Elahi wound up when he was mistaken for somebody else and thought to be stockpiling explosives.  

Hasan Baba interviewed Elahi for San Francisco’s KALW radio station and explains that:

He was eventually cleared, but the experience inspired him to launch a project called “Hiding in Plain Sight” in which he photographs every single detail of his daily life – no matter how mundane – and uploads it on his website for the world – and …