European Union and United States' Essay

Total Length: 843 words ( 3 double-spaced pages)

Total Sources: 1

Page 1 of 3

' While in theory this may seem defensible, in practice it is more questionable to carefully watch every second an employee spends online -- if the employee does a bit of Christmas-shopping online, but is otherwise productive, should this be used against the employee? And cannot such objectionable sites be blocked, without violating employee privacy? What if the employee uses his or her work email to send one or two brief personal emails -- the time 'theft' is quite minimal, yet so easy to do companies are falling prey to this temptation. And the issues of time theft blurs as employees do more work on their home computers for work -- work is taking over the home and ' private time' already. Yet this also means employees can store secret work-related items that they could store and share, if left unmonitored. Finally, RFID (radio-frequency IDs) in the workplace, which track employee movements, are controversial -- they improve security, true, but they also allow employees to be tracked in a step-by-step fashion, from the bathroom to the break room -- a waitress who sits down in the high-tech restaurant of tomorrow could be reprimanded by a supervisor far away, who is tracking her movements.Should Web search engines such as Yahoo and Google honor requests by the Chinese government to reveal the identities of political dissenters? Is it better for the companies to operate in China and provide as much information access as possible, or to stand on moral principle and risk being shut down?

To reveal the identities of political dissidents is to become complicit in the illegitimate actions of the Chinese government, and essentially forces Yahoo and Google to allow dissenting individuals to be arrested and subject to severe punishments, merely because the dissidents exercised their freedom of speech. Yahoo and Google should not operate in China, if revealing the names of dissidents is made a condition of their permanent residency as enterprises within the nation.

Remaining within China and allowing for some types of information provided by the Web to be blocked might be acceptable, to continue to make some outreaches to the nation's people and to spread knowledge. But to actively participate in the rounding-up of dissidents effectively makes these companies an arm of a repressive regime, which they must reject.

Works Cited

EU data privacy directive. (2009). Privacilla. Retrieved September 17, 2009 at http://www.privacilla.org/business/eudirective.html.....

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