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Monitoring Employee Web Usage
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posted by scubacuda
on Saturday February 08, @01:20PM
from the get-new-employees-if-you-don't-trust-them dept.
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Having grudgingly implemented such fw/proxy solutions as Websense/CheckPoint and Surf Control, I totally agree with Business 2.0's article (/. thread here) on the unintended consquences of Internet monitoring in the workplace: people tend to be unhappy in an environment of mistrust. Until more groups like Peacefire and Peekabooty fight back, it looks many employees will have little choice. (IANAL, but if an employer can't legally prevent me from, say, bringing in the sports page, then on what legal grounds can it prevent me from accessing that same sports page via the web?)
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Monitoring Employee Web Usage
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Saturday February 08, @05:40PM (#601)
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"(IANAL, but if an employer can't legally prevent me from, say, bringing in the sports page, then on what legal grounds can it prevent me from accessing that same sports page via the web?)"
Well, IANAL, either. But, the sport page (assuming you mean a printed newspaper) is something you purchased and own, your property. Although, the words and pictures on it happen to be someone else's intelectual "property". That is a another discussion.
In the normal case the computer, the desk it sits on, the chair your ass rests in, the network, the fat pipe to The Internet, are all the property of your employer. Your employer grants you conditional use of this property so that you can make them money. One of the conditions can be, no sports page for you. Even during your break or after work.
Even if they don't explictly state the conditions there are all sorts of non-obvious "automatic" conditions various courts have said to exist. Some pro-facsist employer, some pro-employee privacy.
I might be a coward, but I'm not anonymous,
my name is norm harman
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In the normal case the computer, the desk it sits on, the chair your ass rests in, the network, the fat pipe to The Internet, are all the property of your employer. Your employer grants you conditional use of this property so that you can make them money. One of the conditions can be, no sports page for you. Even during your break or after work.
I thought about that. But where does that line of reasoning end? You may have bought the newspaper, but you are reading it in their "space." You're ass is still in their chair (and hopefully is on break). Why couldn't they grant you similar conditional use of this property?
Access should be limited/denied only if somebody's internet use
- consumes a lot of bandwidth,
- eats into their productivity, and/or
- exposes the company to significant risks (viruses, warez, MP3z, etc.).
Until one of these is the case, then I see no difference between surfing the sports page versus bringing in the sports section from the paper.
Even if they don't explictly state the conditions there are all sorts of non-obvious "automatic" conditions various courts have said to exist. Some pro-facsist employer, some pro-employee privacy.
My "beef" with many of the companies that do this is not that they want to limit personal things that people do at work, but rather that they are inconsistent.
- The abusers of the Internet are NOT (from my experience) the temps making $10/hr; it's (to pick one "random" example) the executive who looks up prostitutes in the city that he's going to be flying into the next week. (How stupid can you be? We told everyone that just b/c you could see the site does NOT mean that it wasn't being recorded.)
- Many of these same companies have no problem having you do work-related things on your personal time. If you're going to require a salaried employee (particularly one in an IT dept) to be on call after hours, check work e-mail after hours, etc. then you have to be flexible when that employee has to take care of certain types of personal issues on company times (online banking, etc.)
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie. Noel Godin
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IAL, but TINLA (This is not legal advice):
An employer could in fact prevent you from bringing in a newspaper, or from otherwise participating in any other activity it liked (within certain limitations, of course, as various civil rights laws may dictate). However, the "legitimacy" of prohibiting access of online resources is seen as greater because there are typically written policies in place which say that company resources (computers) should only be used for business purposes (and not for checking sports scores). No such explicit ban against reading the newspaper is likely to exist in a company's policies.
The worry for employers is applying their policies in a fair and equal manner to all employees. If Johnny was fired for surfing the web (pursuant to a policy prohibiting non-business use of computers), and it just so happens that Jenny surfs the web just as much as Johnny and was not fired, then Johnny and Jenny's Employer had better have an explanation if Johnny wants to bring a suit for discrimination.
And, of course if you're the type of employer that thinks monitoring of employees' Internet access is Kosher, then you've probably got some peeved Johnnies out there...
Over and out.
MD
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Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be
lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.
- Isaac Asimov
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