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AOL Selling AIM Gateway/Listener To Employers
PizzaFace writes "After pushing free instant messaging to more than 100,000,000 users, AOL is now selling AIM-monitoring software to businesses that want to monitor and control the messaging of their employees. AIM Enterprise Gateway will reportedly sell for about $35/employee/year."
Because you can encrypt your messages.
It's a big deal because it's brilliant! It's a fantastic business plan and a wonderful idea. Get everyone to use your program such that it becomes a scourge, and make people pay to get rid of it. I love it.
They even made it so that they could be the only ones to kill it.
Brilliant! It makes me laugh out loud, what a wonderful move this is for AOL!
Employees should have no expectation of privacy for any information placed into the business equipment of the Company/government... This policy shall serve as notice to any and all that Company/government equipment may be monitored without further notice.
There is plenty of other text that details this, but that's the meat of it. Companies have a right to monitor any traffic to protect their interests. If you don't want your AOL messages watched, find a company that supports employee privacy on company equipment over covering its own ass. Good luck, because I've never heard of one.
I think it's kind of shady on AOL's part to suddenly roll over on its user base. However, there are a lot companies that don't allow IM because it's more difficult to keep an eye on than email. AOL may benefit from more acceptance as a result of this move.
The companies can still get around this, don't assume that they are that inept and encryption will protect you. One thing they can do is install and hide key logging software, software that takes screen shots of what you are writing, etc.
This sort of argument always goads me and I'll tell you why.
I was surfing around on my home PC last week and found an interesting application that could save me some time at work. I downloaded it, put it on a floppy disk, took it to work next day, installed it and saved myself 20 minutes work for the week. This was on my time; I would never have been surfing at work to find it. I have saved my boss two days work this year, and next year, the year after and so on.
Should I charge my boss for this? It doesn't really seem worth to me. It only took me a minute.
Should I complain that my work life is interfering with my home life because I sometimes think about the job even when I'm not there? I think he might laugh at me. This is the year 2002 and the boundaries, rightly or wrongly, between home and work are close.
If a company cannot trust its staff to make the odd instant message or personnel phone call then they probably are doomed. If they have the money to spend spying on staff like this then there is something terribly wrong with their attitude and I wouldn't want to work for them. If someone in the company is not pulling their weight because they are chatting all day then it will show - you don't need spying software for this.
It's about a bit of give and take. Not spying on conversations with the missus.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
... and every other kind of IT employee monitoring solution is that they are implemented by the IT DEPARTMENT.
Who by definition are the worst offenders.
And because they're all buddies, they "bypass" the monitoring for their own IP addresses.
Total waste of time.
How is allowing someone else to monitor my communications more secure?
Just keep in mind who the customer is. In the mass market, the customer is rarely the user.
Nope, no sig
1. Gives security conscious corporations a reason to allow AIM rather than ban it (not so long ago, I seem to remember, the AIM client had a security hole. Wasn't that '99?)
2. Allows companies to unify their methods of IMing, a product which is actually a really good business tool. If you're on a conference call, phone call, in a meeting...there are lots of times it's great to have a live medium to communicate with a coworker. Easier than remembering Joe down at helpdesk is B1gP3n1s.
3. The CYAN (Cover your ass network). Hey, I know that you don't have to worry about this when you're down at the bar putting the moves on the blonde, but do that at work and it's all of a sudden the company's liability. Of course, you could lose your job. But they could lose money and time too. Don't forget, not every company out there is a big evil CORPORATION.
Those are three fine reasons. Hey, we don't open up the firewall and have mail delivered to a server on every desktop, why do the same with IM? It's a logical way to start partitioning off Instant Messaging, rather than having massive servers off somewhere else handling messages. And in a lot of cases, companies are leery about plaintext running around the web with potential trade secrets. It's silly, when it could route locally.
I'm not saying that AOL's solution is the one and only, but the idea is a good one. For the same reason we use mail servers, file servers, PBX systems, it makes sense. With companies convinced that IM is necessary for productivity, it opens the doors for other solutions, non proprietary in nature. And it opens the demands for secure features to be built into clients. Hey, somebody's gotta pay the bills, right? And we know that it won't be AOL people dialling up...
-- Bird in the Bush: The Renewable Energy Blog http://www.birdinthebush.org
The whole point of this system is not to determine whether employees are using lots of IM. It's to insure that employees aren't using IM services for "inappropriate" purposes such as cybersex, or to give away sensitive information. (Or both, as the case my be.)
Incidentally, if I had my employees using IM for intra-company communications I would damn well want them encrypting their communications. Do you really want company data going through some untrusted external server? If I didn't want my employees using IM at all, I'd just block the ports.
A lot of companies have a very important need for this, other than just the desire to "snoop" on their employees. For example, many firms such as brokerage houses are required to monitor and keep records of their employees' interactions with clients. The article alludes to these groups slightly, without going into much detail. These companies would like to be able to use instant messanging to communicate with clients, but right now regulations stop them from using AIM, unless they somehow develop their own monitoring software. It's companies like these that AOL is really targeting with this product. Of course, a lot of these companies are also demanding that all the IM providers adopt and open/interoperable standard, which AOL isn't quite as willing to do.