Everyone has their own definition of when a recession begins. For me, it was when I read the story about the cocaine dealer in America who was including a fuel surcharge in the price of his drugs. The incredulous police who intercepted the conversation must have wondered whether to arrest the dealer or audit his accounts to find out if he was eligible to have his debts guaranteed under the Congressional bail-out package.

When drug dealers start to fret about their overheads and the size of their sub-prime debts, you know that public confidence in the economy has hit an all-time low.

The provident drug dealer is not the only worker under surveillance — most employers admit to using social networking sites such as Facebook to catch employees faking illness. Such workers are clearly so stupid one wonders how they manage to switch on their computer each day, let alone post an online description of their illicit activities. Any day I sneak off work, my status update on Facebook says: “Am too weak to type today; please send flowers and grapes to the usual address.”

According to a survey last week, eight out of ten bosses say they are also using the internet to check out potential new employees. What surprises me about this is not the eight bosses who are checking, but the two who are clearly happy to take a risk on someone whose hobbies may include following strangers home and whose inspiration is Marilyn Manson.

Of course, there is no reason why all of this snooping should only work in one direction. The next time your boss says that there will be no pay rises and everyone in the company will have to tighten their belt, take a peek at his Facebook page and count how many foreign holidays he’s had this year and who he took with him. When he says he is nipping out for a board meeting, a quick check on the internet will soon reveal what golf club he is frequenting. After all, how can a boss legitimately complain about you surveying his personal life if he regards yours as fair game?

In fact the whole issue of surveillance in the workplace is a grey area. Employers may wish to monitor their workforce for a variety of legitimate reasons, such as preventing theft or ensuring the health and safety of staff. But if used inappropriately, such monitoring can have an adverse impact on staff by intruding into their private lives and can interfere with the relationship of mutual trust and confidence between worker and employer. Data-protection issues may also arise if an employer is not only monitoring the workforce but is also collecting, storing and using personal information.

In one leading Irish case, a secret tape recording was made of a local authority worker being abusive to a foreman in circumstances where the worker had previously denied such conduct. The worker objected to it being used in a disciplinary hearing, but the High Court held that the tape was comparable to the production of photographs showing a plaintiff with an allegedly bad back lifting concrete blocks. The case only dealt with the issue briefly, so it threw little light on how Irish courts would balance the constitutional right to privacy against an employer’s right to know what is going on in his workplace.

More generally, Irish courts have shown a willingness to permit surveillance material to be used if it exposes potentially fraudulent conduct. In one case a local authority took photographs of someone who was claiming damages against them for personal injuries.

Some showed the plaintiff in the street but others were of her in the living room of her home. The High Court held that, provided no trespass was committed in the taking of the photographs and they showed no more than what someone walking down the street could have seen, they could be used. So if you walk to and fro in your front room with the curtains open, then passers-by who look in are not violating your privacy.

By analogy, people should realise that using Facebook is like throwing the curtains open on your entire social life.

The most inventive solution I have seen was in an English case involving an insurance company which believed it was the subject of a fraudulent claim and got inside the plaintiff’s home by getting an investigator to pose as a market researcher. The judge thought that the behaviour of the insurance company was outrageous, but knew that if he excluded the evidence a false claim might succeed. He therefore allowed the evidence to be admitted but said that he was going to award the costs of the case against the insurance company in order to teach it a lesson.

Why does any of this matter? Because a study of small businesses last month revealed that firms lost €800m last year due to absenteeism.

Mind you, this is nothing compared with banks, who have been losing that every week due to the fact that their employees were turning up and doing a full day’s work as normal. In fact,the banks whose chief investment strategists spent the last three months pretending to be sick while tending their Facebook pages are probably the ones best placed to survive.

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