There are three women in my office who have put blackout screen protectors on their monitors. Y’know, the sheets of film that make screens visible pretty much solely to the user, as looking at them from the slightest angle makes them appear black and impossible to see through. What most people put on their laptops, from when they really don’t want people near them to see what they’re doing on planes or coffee shops; shielding their personal devices in public places.
But yeah, there are a few people in my office who have put these screen shields on their work machines. Since we all work in a cubicle jungle, what this says is that they do not want random people, passing through, to be able to see what they are doing. The question I have to that is, what exactly would they be doing that requires the need for such extreme security measures?
I work in a typical office environment, where the internet is monitored, and to a degree Big Brother is always watching. I admittedly spend time surfing the internet when I don’t have work, because I’m good at what I do, and I create downtime for myself by knocking out my assignments and work in an expedient fashion. But I’m also not stupid, and going to risky websites, and I’m astute enough to even be weary of the links I click by even paying attention to what words are in the URLs. Sure, even CNN, Yahoo, BuzzFeed and other fairly innocuous media outlets will occasionally have Katy Perry’s massive tits front row and center, or main stories involving sex scandals or the mass murder of the month, but for the most part, I think it’s safe for me to say that I’m pretty smart and conservative with what I look at while I’m at work.
And I’m pretty sure everyone knows that I surf when I’ve got downtime. I’m not worried, because I know that everyone else does the same thing when they have downtime. I know people have walked past my station, and seen baseball players or even worse, boring baseball statistical graphs and charts on my screen. But the fact of the matter is that there’s nothing appearing on my screen while I’m at work that I feel would necessitate the need for blackout privacy screen protectors.
In fact, by putting on privacy screens, I feel that that’s only inviting suspicion to that I might now be suddenly looking at things I shouldn’t be while at work. Sure, when inevitably the IT guys go through my web history and see that I’m primarily looking at a whole lot of baseball, video game or Wikipedia, I’d be absolved, but it doesn’t change the fact that suspicious actions only succeeds in creating scrutiny.
Which isn’t to say that I think that the women who have put these privacy screens on their monitors are doing no good, and looking at illicit websites, but it doesn’t help their cause in making more suspicious people from thinking they might be. I know for a fact that some of them aren’t doing anything wrong; if anything at all, they’re looking at the same kind of mundane time-wasters that I am, save for celebrity gossip sites, so frankly I don’t really see the need for such extreme privacy guards.
To each their own, I suppose.
