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The Hewlett-Packard spying scandal is drawing attention to the growing corporate practice of snooping on employees.

The Silicon Valley computer company obtained phone records of employees, board members and journalists by deception, and tried to plant snooping software on a reporter’s PC. Although it's making headlines now, workplace spying is quite common and generally legal.

It’s on a lesser scale than the HP tactics, but electronic monitoring of employees is increasing as snooping technology gets simpler and cheaper.

Corporations are snooping on employees, but it's usually on routine matters like how much time they spend on surfing the Web. A survey by the American Management Association finds more than three quarters of companies track employees' Web surfing, and read e-mail and computer files. Companies are trying to prevent employees from wasting time, consuming too much bandwidth, disclosing trade secrets, importing computer viruses and watching internet porn.

Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute, says too often employee monitoring drifts into voyeurism.

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