Yeah, and there's a reason some places have laws against bugging offices. One key thing is that everyone should be clear on what's recorded and what's not, and "if it's written down" at least has the virtue of relative simplicity. Probably if it's not supposed to be fair game for later investigation it shouldn't be logged at all.

I think part of the trouble is that we spend too much time at work for most people to actually be productive the whole time -- if you buy the notion that it's reasonable for people to be at work to work, and they shouldn't be socializing whathaveyou, then logging everything seems more reasonable than if you recognize that no one can actually be a drone 40/hr a week, then the surveillance starts to look like de facto surveillance of stuff other than the job, which is more worrying.

I am in the privileged position of doing freelance work, on my own machine, mostly remote. As such, if I'm using a client's communication systems it is essentially guaranteed to be work related, so having it logged doesn't bother me; if I'm not working I'm using something else. But being monitored for half your waking hours five days a week feels much more onerous.

I suspect some of a this is tension with reasonable expectations of levels of monitoring from when less of our communication was via the network.