ARE you being watched? I don’t mean that old paranoid stuff about strangers in dark cars and old ladies with cameras in their hats. No, this is everyday electronic surveillance of your activities — by your boss.

This issue arose in America this month after Patricia Dunn, the chair of Hewlett-Packard, agreed to step aside after admitting that she had asked private investigators to pry into the personal phone records of HP’s board members and some journalists — just to see who’d been talking to whom.

That was rather naughty, but in our electronic age, employers can easily and legitimately harvest masses of data about you, such as your e-mails and phone calls, every key you touch on your computer and every website you visit. All this means that the boss may literally read your thoughts. This is nu-paranoia, and we will all have to learn to live with it.

Anne Fisher, of Fortune magazine, estimates that more than 90 per cent of American companies now perform at least spot monitoring of their workers’ e-mail and internet use. British companies can’t be too far behind. “You have to assume at work that anything that you’re typing can and will be seen,” she says. “Implant the idea in your mind that there is no expectation of privacy,” Fisher adds. “When you’re using your employer’s equipment, use it as if everything you do is going to be broadcast to the world.”

This will inevitably cause identity and role problems for workers. If the boss expects you to be around 24/7 and you have a personal digital assistant paid for by your him, when, if ever, will you have the right to say: “No, that was a personal call or e-mail and you can’t access it.”?

But still, look on the bright side. In future, there will be only one thing worse than having your electronic activities monitored by your corporation. That will be not having them monitored. Are you so unimportant?

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