Text 2 Companies have the legal right to monitor employees' e-mail and instant messaging.

Text 2

Companies have the legal right to monitor employees' e-mail and instant messaging. Many do, whether they warn their workers or not. Last monty the University of Tennessee released the e-mail correspondence between an administrator and a married college president in which the administrator wrote of her love for him, and of her use of drugs and alcohol to deal with her unhappiness. Employers, including The New York Times and Dow Chemical, have fired workers for send-ing improper e-mail.

But the fastest-growing area for Internet spying is the home. SpectorSoft, a leading manufac-

turer of spyware, at first marketed its products to parents 'and employers. Sales jumped enormous-ly, however, when the company changed its pitch to target romantic partners. “In just one day of running Spector on my home PC, I was able to identify my boyfriend's true personality," a mes-sage on the company' s website declares.

What can you expect if someone puts SpectorSoft ' s Spector 2. 2 0n your computer？ It will take hundreds of records an hour of every website and e-mail that appears on your screen, and store them so that someone who is spying on you can review them later. A new product, SpectorSoft's eBlaster, will send the spy detailed e-mail reports updating your computer activities frequently. These products keep the people being spied on totally unaware.

SpectorSoft has sold 35,000 copies of its spyware, and it has only a piece of a flourishing

market. Win What Where, another big player, sells primarily to businesses, but what it calls the

"discontented family member" market has been finding Win What Where. Many smaller companies have sites that sell relatively crude " key-loggers," software that records every keystroke typed on a computer.

Isn't all this spying on loved ones a little creepy？ Not to SpectorSoft president Doug Fowler."If you' re in a committed relationship and you get caught because of evidence online, as far as I'm concerned you deserve to be caught," he says. Richard Eaton, president of Win What Where,recognizes that in a perfect world users would reveal that they have placed monitoring software on a computer. But Win What Where Investigator has a feature that allows it to be completely hidden. "Our customers demanded it," he says.

51. From the text we learn that most companies in the U. S. _________

[A] forbid their employees to get online at work

[ B] respect the online privacy of their employees

[ C] reveal the privacy of their employees publicly

[ D] monitor the online activities of their employees