The age-old conflict between an employee’s right to privacy and the employer’s right to know what is going on in the workplace has reached a head with the near-simultaneous arrival of human rights and electronic surveillance legislation. The Human Rights Act 1998 came into force on October 2, giving employees the right to keep personal correspondence at work, including e-mail, private. On the other hand, a code of practice issued under the controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIP) gives employers wide powers to read all communications in the workplace.

The result, experts say, is that personal e-mail is likely to be banned from corporate systems, and wage slaves who want to communicate at their desks will have to set up their own e-mail accounts with servers such as Freeserve or Hotmail. The clash marks a turning point in attitudes to private use of corporate systems.

Until the 1970s, when the PABX became universal, telephonists not only connected every call, they listened in on the first few seconds. Secretaries opened the mail and the print department did the copying. Surveillance was total.

First automated exchanges removed controls on private phone use. Then cheap, unsupervised photocopiers were placed in every corridor. Finally, e-mail came directly to every worker’s terminal, eliminating the secretary.

Office culture has also relaxed, reflecting the more liberal, informal, laissez-faire attitudes of society.

Human nature being what it is, however, many firms are finding that unsupervised access to phones, photocopiers and e-mail is being abused. A small number of employees are spending hours in chat rooms, e-shopping and exchanging personal e-mails.

Worse, in the past few weeks alone, staff have been sacked by mobile phone network Orange, merchant bank Deutchesbank and stockbrokers Merrill Lynch for allegedly sending pornographic e-mail, something that would have been difficult to do using the old office postal system.

In the US, corporations are ending up in court defending themselves for sexist and racist e-mail they had no idea were circulating round the company e-mail system. Oil giant Chevron was stung for $2.2 million when lawyers hunting for evidence in a sexual harassment case found e-mail containing the hoary old joke about a beer being better than a woman (admit it - you know the one).

Combined with increasing leakage of confidential information to competitors, it is not surprising that corporations are trying to reassert control over their e-mail systems.

Bringing back the secretary is clearly not an option, so software is being introduced that scans e-mail for signs of abuse. According to Chris Christiansen, the director of Internet security at analysts IDC, at least half of the corporate e-mail systems of the US are monitored, and this ratio is due to rise steeply as more high-profile cases of e-mail abuse and even espionage reach the court.

“The pendulum has swung to the point where people are thinking they can use corporate property any way they like,” Mr Christiansen says. “Web access does not mean you can spend ridiculous amounts of time surfing.”

But corporations are not out to nail employees every time they take a look at the weather forecast using their company Web connection, Mr Christiansen says. “Fewer than 5 per cent, often fewer than 1 per cent of people, are causing the problems,” he claims. “Companies are not looking for people sending the occasional e-mail to their friends, they are looking for the people downloading porn, the people running little “spam” businesses on the side, and people posting confidential information to competitors.”

Mr Christiansen rejects fears that corporations could use e-mail surveillance to impose absolute conformism, even thought control, on their employees.

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