> We were investigating the employee as part of their offboarding.
I do not know how it works in your country, but anything that you discover of his personal life becomes a liability for the company. If he had AIDS and now you get that knowledge and it leaks, you may find the company fined for big money. In Europe, again and again, companies are forbidden to use any knowledge gained spying on employees.
What reason would you have to investigate an employee that is leaving the company anyway? Unless it has some contractual impact and your company HR/legal department is aware, there is no reason. "To see what the employee was doing" is not a legal reason.
I strongly agree that IT needs ethical education. That you have access to some information does not mean that you have the right to access it or that it is moral to do so.
(I'm in the US and have worked a similar job as the parent poster and have had to do similar things on several occasions.)
>What reason would you have to investigate an employee that is leaving the company anyway? Unless it has some contractual impact and your company HR/legal department is aware, there is no reason. "To see what the employee was doing" is not a legal reason.
In our case, we would and could never investigate someone for any reason besides HR and/or legal explicitly requesting it for a specific reason and telling us what they wanted us to look for and why. "Fishing expeditions" weren't permitted. (There were a few occasions where such fishing expedition requests did come from them, and our managers would push back and basically professionally tell them to fuck off.)
I'm not sure of any specific laws or liabilities, but I'm sure we also would (and should) have likely been sued if we discovered some sensitive personal information about an employee and that information then leaked. If we inadvertently stumbled across personal things like that during the course of a specific investigation, we would always ignore it and not make any record of it. We didn't care about someone's personal life and didn't intentionally ever look at anything related to it.
Due to the nature of the investigations, it was often unavoidable that we'd end up seeing something at least somewhat personal, even if it's just some random website they habitually browsed appearing multiple times in their browsing history.
So, we would never look at an employee's computer or network traffic "just to see what they were doing" or just because we could. That would definitely be extremely unethical and unprofessional, and if management discovered any of us doing that we surely would and should have been fired. However, I'm not sure if there are actually any laws against that in the US if it's disclosed in the employment contract.
I do not know how it works in your country, but anything that you discover of his personal life becomes a liability for the company. If he had AIDS and now you get that knowledge and it leaks, you may find the company fined for big money. In Europe, again and again, companies are forbidden to use any knowledge gained spying on employees.
What reason would you have to investigate an employee that is leaving the company anyway? Unless it has some contractual impact and your company HR/legal department is aware, there is no reason. "To see what the employee was doing" is not a legal reason.
I strongly agree that IT needs ethical education. That you have access to some information does not mean that you have the right to access it or that it is moral to do so.