Hewlett Packard chairman Patricia Dunn is implicated in one of the biggest scandals of the year that involved spying on members of the HP board and journalists to try to figure out who was leaking boardroom secrets. While this scandal made front page news, hundreds of corporations routinely spy on their employees without the media noticing at all.

Some companies are going so far as to use hidden cameras in restrooms and hidden GPS devices in company cars to spy on employees. More typically, though, corporate surveillance consists of logging everything that employees do on company computers, from instant messaging to emailing to surfing the Web. Often, employees aren’t even told they are being watched.

A bigger problem exists with employees who log onto work computers from home, allowing employers to track everything created, signed onto, or posted, even outside work hours. Suddenly, the line between work life and private life has become very blurry.

There are two sides to the argument. Folks like Kaiser Spokesman Matthew Schiffgens think workplace Internet monitoring by IT departments is fair. Others, like Jeremy Gruber, legal director of the National Workrights Institute, point out that there are laws that prohibit employers from listening to employee’s private phone calls. So, why isn’t the same protection afforded for personal email or personal business conducted on the Web?

Gruber points out that legislation is slow to address emerging technologies and businesses are taking advantage of that fact by monitoring their employees’ activities.

A sizeable industry has sprung up to offer software to monitor employees. Some products allow managers to track everything their employees do online. Others allow managers to generate overall reports that show what kinds of Web sites employees are visiting and to provide detailed analyses of the Web habits of unproductive workers.

Some employees are shocked at the ways that corporate monitoring has hurt their careers. Clifton Swigert, a former employee of Allegheny Electric was fired after anonymously posting some negative views about the company in a Yahoo discussion forum. Swigert used his own computer, wrote anonymously and wrote after work hours. Yet, the company decided to track down the anonymous poster and subpoenaed Yahoo for Swigert’s real name. The company then decided to drop the suit and fire him instead, even though Swigert had thirteen years of perfect attendance.

Blogs are also creating problems for employees at work. Some companies have issued “blog policies” to prevent employees from airing company dirty laundry. Personal blogs that breach a company’s policy can lead to a person being fired. Joyce Park, author of the blog called Troutgirl was fired from Friendster and told the reason was blogging. She was not even sure what it was that she had said that was offensive.

Some companies are hiring search firms to check out an applicant’s background even before the person is hired, which can include going to blogs and social network sites. In effect, this means that employment monitoring could start even before employees begin their contracts. Some employees find this loss of privacy shocking. Others just accept it as the way the work world is today.