Spies in the corner office?

As rapidly as technology has given talkative humans new ways to connect with one another, it has added to the listening power of the third-party snoop. And these days - if you believe the statistics - nobody is listening in more than employers. Experts say frenzied competition, cheap monitoring technologies, and worries about litigation motivate bosses to look over employees' shoulders.

The Privacy Foundation, an advocacy group based in Denver, released a study earlier this year that says about 1 of every 3 Americans who use e-mail or the Internet regularly are being monitored by employers. By the foundation's counting, that's roughly 14 million workers out of the 40 million who regularly go online at work.

The American Management Association also released its annual survey of its corporate members: Three-quarters of the responding US firms reported that they record and review "employee communications and activities on the job, including their phone calls, e-mail, Internet connections, and computer files."

That figure, says the association, has doubled since its last study, in 1997. Critics of monitoring call the reported rise potentially damaging to worker morale.

But studies like the AMA's are often misinterpreted or not fully reported, cautions Carl Botan, a professor of communications at Purdue University.

"In the AMA study, those firms questioned tended to be the biggest and most sophisticated 5 to 10 percent of American employers," Professor Botan says, adding that the study did not ask respondents how much they watch or what percentage of their employees they target.

"It only asked if they monitored any [employees] at all, and what kinds of methods they used," he says. "A lot of media outlets have misreported the study. AMA is not saying that three-quarters of all employers monitor."

Some corporate managers don't have a problem with personal Internet use at work. According to an April survey of 200 corporate chief information officers by CIO Magazine, most (62 percent) said "personal e-mail and Internet use at work increases employee productivity, because it empowers employees to multitask."

Only 17 percent in that study said they conducted even sporadic employee e-mail checks. Sixteen percent didn't monitor employee e-mail at all, and 11 percent reported peeking only at the e-mail of "problem employees." Thirty-eight percent reportedly intervene only after a complaint.

To get a clearer picture of what's happening, Botan is asking the National Science Foundation for a grant to conduct "the first ever national probability sampling in the US, to find out just how many people are actually surveilled, and what variations there are by region, industry, age, race, and sex."

Experts agree that companies have good reasons to monitor. Worker productivity is often at issue. Personal phone calls and e-mail can eat company time.

New technologies - such as downloadable music - offer new distractions.

In July, Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., allegedly fired one of its secretaries for downloading music files on her work computer. She had downloaded some 2,000 files, despite her employer's prohibition against using company resources for personal reasons.

As more workers acquire home-based and portable technology, they may rely less on corporate hardware. The need to keep workers from personal Web surfing may also wane on its own.

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