The Ethics of Shoulder Surfing

I confess, I'm an avid shoulder surfer. I always snatch a sneaky look at the newspapers being read by the people sitting around me. Partly because my local train station obviously isn't important enough to get a delivery of free papers, partly because newspapers on the whole are messy and annoying (black fingers, lovely) and partly because I just can.

I don't normally bother looking at people's laptops though, not because I have concerns about privacy but because on the whole looking at spreadsheets and the like is rather boring. Yesterday though I spent quite a while doing just that. I was watching a woman from Capgemini working on a spreadsheet which caught my eye because it was about data flows and integration. Yes, I find data flows and integration interesting, what of it? Anyway, as it turned out it was fairly boring, but while gawking I did notice that she'd made a systematic error in the spreadsheet. Nothing serious, in fact it was quite amusing, she was referring to American security behemoth Lockheed Martin as Lockhead Martin. At first I gave her the benefit of the doubt, thinking maybe it was some sort of jokey internal project name, but then she flicked to a PowerPoint that quite clearly showed she'd just screwed it up.

So the dilemma is, should I have mentioned it? Or even better, should I have tried to get her to put Headlock Martin instead?