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Workplace Privacy - IBM Hot, Lilly Not
Brahmastra writes "Reuters has posted an article about the best and worst companies for workplace privacy, passing on information from the forthcoming issue of Wired Magazine, and IBM comes out on top. How does your workplace compare?" According to the summary, Eli Lilly was rated "the most notorious Big Brother boss", after "...its invasive background checks of workers after Sept. 11, 2001, some of which led to dismissals."
My employer is pretty good when it comes to workplace privacy and freedom. Afterall, they don't seem to mind me reading Slas
Still can't masturbate in the privacy of my cube without someone complaining to HR. The terrorists have already won...
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
At least they're an equal opportunity privacy violator, as happy to spill the beans on their customers as their employees. People just have no respect for corporate consistency these days.
Wow! IBM seems to really be doing well in a geek's eyes right now. They don't spy on employees...they are helping the Linux battle against SCO, not to mention helping further open source by contributing to Linux, eclipse, and others.
Good job, IBM!
ikeya
---- Move SIG...For great justice!
Of course IBM comes out on top, as far as privacy goes. I've never worked there, but all the stories i hear about IBM gives me the impression that they are stuffy, overly structured, and overprofessional... Kinda like the IRS or the CIA.
Especially thier legal department. You just don't fuck with IBM....
do() || do_not();
Remember when IBM was The Man? Not as in "You The Man", but as in "You've sold out to The Man, man!" The Evil Empire? Big, corporate, bad guys? Now, they love Linux, they don't snoop on employees, they fight SCO-style crap, and so on? When did they get all nice-nice?
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Disclaimer: I no longer, but once did work for Big Blue
Of course they can't spy on you, you are't allowed to do anything. FACT: Leaving a single penny (or any change) in your desk at IBM is considered a security violation because someone seeing it may make them want to steal it, and they wish to keep an honest person honest.
while Ford and Sears were praised for voluntarily signing on with stringent data-protection laws in Europe and California.
How can you voluntarily sign on to a law? Does that imply I can opt out of the laws I don't like?
So let's see.. This is an article about an article about an article that hasn't been published yet? Awesome.. Let's create news articles by playing that old game of Telephone! Oh wait.. I think that's how the media works in the first place...
So.. This is a comment about a comment about an articl.. Oh forget it..
Geoffeg
I've been afraid of this. The proliferation of penis enlargement spam, and thus penis enlargement "natural herbal methods" has given companies an excuse not to pay up on health insurance claims. If you measure 3" longer than you should (to say nothing of breadth and vigor), you've obviously been popping the pills, and since the side effects are unknown, your claim is nullified. It's the new urine test, only you don't even need a glass of water.
Either that or the parent poster is less Informative than the moderators suspect.
The article has just 8 companies listed. That means anyone seeking further info has to buy the wired magazine. I'm already subscribing to Wired, so I don't mind, but what about people who don't.Well, maybe they will get it off Wired's website.
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
In the work place, I expect to have all my correspondence, activity, anything that crosses their network to, at least, be open to scrutiny.
;)
Honestly, my time at work is for working. I know that's not a popular view with some, but it really comes down to asking yourself what you use your time for.
If you're comfortable with your boss knowing what sites you're looking at and he's comfortable with you looking at them, then there's no problem.
But to *expect* privacy I think is assuming you have a different relationship with your boss/company than you do: they're paying you to be there and do a job, and whatever means they take to ensure they're getting their money's worth is reasonable.
With all that said... I did post this from work.
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
Ironic that a medical company would be at the bottom in preserving its employee's privacy... considering that the medical industry has so many dramatic and rediculously strict laws devoted solely to preserving at all costs the CONSUMER'S privacy, or at least the privacy of their records..
While it's esay for us to sit here and complain on them for invasive background checks of workers after Sept. 11 its not that easy for them to avoid getting decent workers that don't disclose their research to terrorists. For example if Bin-Laden got hold of all the research of Elly he might avoid getting diseases like osteoporosis, cancer, depression, schizophrenia and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. So actually its better that they check their future employees than Bin-Laden getting 120 yeras old.
Proud patriot and republican voter.
I, for one, welcome our new rulers from IBM....
snoops peoples emails, record the websites they went to, monitor phone calls (incoming and outgoing) and watch how much time you spent in the bathroom and away from your desk. If she found out you were planning on quitting, she'd have tech image your drive so she could look for anything to sue you for.
And that was if you were on the boss's good side.
Glad to hear the bitch's company is on the verge of failing.
It's one of the few companies I know that has a yahoo group made of former employees where you can go to vent your spleen without worrying about getting sued by your former boss.
Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
There's not much information provided by this link. It seems very lacking in detail. They take a couple of pot-shots at Eli Lilly and Wal-mart, but fail to provide any hard data to substantiate their claims of intrusive behavior. Not very fair, if you ask me. And not worth get worked up over. Anyway, employees are a major expense for most companies -- salaries, training, benefits, payroll taxes, etc. It seems to me that corporations have a right to know a great deal about their employees' private lives after investing all that money in them. I know I wouldn't want to invest in a company unless it disclosed information about its business and finances. I don't see why I shouldn't expect it to work the other way around -- companies need to know details about what sort of people they are employing in order to insure their money is being put to its best use.
I did a stint at a big Wall Street company that will remain nameless, but they were pretty free-form. They made me seem as if I were working for a small company, but thrumming underneath it all was this behomoth.
BUT -- despite the freedom in our dept, there were these poor slobs in the shirtsleeves who we knew could never ever tread off the path or righteousness, or the would be eternally damned.
Newsfollow.com
Then their business model fell apart. No more near monopoly on computers. They couldn't even control the "IBM-compatible" market. They were in deep trouble, and somebody realized that their arrogant corporate culture was a big part of the problem. So they hired a new boss from outside the industry, and retooled everything, from the way people worked together to their overreliance on proprietary technology. Worked out well. That which does not kill you, yada yada.
Companies are always searching for ways to squeeze more productivity out of their staff - I wonder if there's ever been any objective study to show that people *don't* work as effectively when they know they are amoebas under microscopic management.
Or do they work harder, and quit earlier? What's the cost of replacement?
It'd sure be nice if a well-funded and run study showed that being nice made people more productive... any studies at all?
Anybody remember the campus of a software company that had free medical (via on-site doctor) child care, membership in a health club, free food (all you can eat) soccer games, and the like?
I seem to remember seeing "60 Minutes" or something on this company - how they were able to improve productivity *and* morale by providing the extras on campus so that the people are just free to work...
Anybody have a link? Can this method be brought to everyday, or is/was this a fluke based on uncommonly good market conditions for said company?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Reminds me of an old job, when one of the bosses tried to install a key-logger on my machine. It stored the key presses as a text file in C:\. Of course I noticed this (hard not to, it kept crashing) -- and being the evil person that I am, I replaced it with some imaginative ASCI art.
I don't work there anymore.
I would post a very angry reply, but I am posting this from work.
I work in the parmaceutical research industry (cancer biochemistry) and it doesn't surprise me that a pharmaceutical company brings up the rear w.r.t. privacy concerns (specifically background checks)
I'm in Canada and a friend got a job in the States for a big pharma a few years back. They did the whole background check and called up all his references etc... I assumed it was because he was Canadian trying to work in the US, but all this was before 9/11. I imagine it's gotten even more stringent since.
One reason for the security is that big pharma have HUGE animal facilities for thier pre-clinical experiments. Not trying to start a flame war here, but it's part of the process that you test potential drugs on animals before you submit an application for a new drug for human trials (IND) to the FDA.
It's quite normal to use thousands of rodents to develop a potential new drug. Not only efficacy, but parameters like maximum tolerated dosage, bioavailability of various formulations, biological half-life, clearance routes, metabolism, etc etc, all have to be characterized in animals before you even think about testing in humans. While appalling to some, it's part of the industry and just a small part of what it takes to get a drug onto the market.
For some companies, the animal facilities are housed in their own massive buildings and secured like a military installation. They probably use hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of animals per year and would make prime targets for animal activists. Probably not a very enticing a target for terrorists, but background checks in this industry are nothing new.
I work for a small company, and we dont do background checks, but during interviews we try and get a sense of a candidates interests and hobbies. Things like volunteering for PETA immediately raises serious red flags.
They kindly leave the firewall configured so I can SSH to my home machine and tunnel to my private proxy. Thanks boss!
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
because all their employees work in Singapore, India, Russia, etc.
Pretty hard to walk buy and catch someone watchin porn when they're halfway around the world!
no comment
I used to work for a fortune 500 company that had a similar policy.
hardcorescooters.com
Love Life.
Not to troll or anything, but after Bush Sr. left the CIA in '77, he became director of Eli Lilly.
In the work place, I expect to have all my correspondence, activity, anything that crosses their network to, at least, be open to scrutiny.
... alas, that privacy has become a victim of 1980s anti-drug hysteria and the radical right agenda that has followed, one that now interprets a private communication as being 'property' of one's employer merely because it happened to be conducted using a piece of company equipment (the telephone) ... at one end.
... and your expectation shows that you have been unfortunate enought to swallow a particularly radical right-wing agenda hook, line, and sinker, to your own, and everyone elses, detriment.
Then you expect to work for felons. Opening a piece of US Mail not addressed to you is a felony, whether the envelope is sitting in your private home mailbox or on your bosses desk. Even the worst libertarian excesses of the 1980s War on Drugs, as presided over by Edwin Meese never changed that particular aspect of the law. These excesses, which encouraged such nonsensical interpretations of property rights to include invading the privacy of anyone who happens to be on said property (taken to its logical conclusion, your employer should have the right to strip search you on "his" property), are in fact in opposition to 200+ years of statutory and common law in the United States.
You have a reasonable expectation of privacy on your person (and, thankfully, our only somewhat brainwashed culture continues to agree...so your boss cannot order you strip searched on suspicion of hiding company documents...yet).
You have a reasonable expectation of privacy in your snail mail correspondence, backed by federal law enforcing that privacy with downright draconian penalties should it be violated.
You have a reasonable expection of privacy when speaking on the phone
You should have a reasonable expectation of privacy in conducting correspondence via email, but again, the same flawed logic has been applied to extend property rights over the medium to include property rights over the content (your correspondence), merely because the medium is new (a computer network) and ignoring two centuries of precedent to the contrary in every other communications medium (including, until the 1980s, telephony).
It is unfortunate that you expect no privacy at work. You are certainly entitled to it
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
There is a line somewhere between spending time working and spending time in jail.
Let's say I hypothetically work for some state goverment in horse country...err... in their IT dept.
I fully expect to have everything I do monitored and checked and this is fine and good. However there are those that tend to feel that such parental micromanagement is more a hindrance than a nessesity. How do you measure the LOSS of productivity? How many times does one NEED to go over an email to make sure that it isn't offensive to some obscure sect of midget neo-nazi lesbians that might accidentally get it?
It takes an awful lot of time to cross the building when you have to walk on egg shells to do it. I'm not trying to say that businesses should not monitor employees but I am trying to say that there is a loss of productivity in trying to make sure that you are walking a very tight, narrow line.
I know most monitoring is for porn, company secrets, company porn or whatever but the truth is that monitoring has gone into overdrive and we are losing our ability to communicate because everything has to be bleached of meaning to avoid offending even the most sensitive soul.
I'm not sure that we can have real communication when we are so worried about accidentally communicating something unpopular.
According to the summary, Eli Lilly was rated "the most notorious Big Brother boss", after "...its invasive background checks of workers after Sept. 11, 2001, some of which led to dismissals."
... doesn't it matter what those background checks uncovered (say, personally donating money to Hamas vs. simply having smoked a joint once in college)?
Umm
And what the hell does "invasive" entail?
Specifics, please!
Joe
http://www.joegrossberg.com
As a former IBM employee, this is true, to a certain extent.
They did expect all items to be locked in a drawer when you leave your desk (even for lunch), and there was a limit on personal photographs that could be placed on one's desk.
As a manager/owner, I hire people for certain positions and I expect them to Do The Right Thing while they're working for me. In return, my employees want me to give them the tools to do their job and then (pretty much) get the hell out of the way, which I'm happy to do. None of us wants micromanagement.
I know that my employees use the company's resources for their own use on occassion. As long as it isn't abused or cause trouble, I'm fine with that. I certainly don't want to waste my time looking over everyone's shoulder. That's far more hassle than it's worth.
If the company and employees both play by those kinds of rules -- they act like adults, in other words -- then the surveillance can go away. But both sides have to abide by the rules and, unfortunately, I don't see that happening anytime soon.
But the levels of privacy made many things difficult and ultimately proved a factor in why I left. Information on salaries, expectations, and how you compared to others were confidential to the point where it was hard to tell where you were. The Personal Business Commitments (PBCs) program that would determine your variable pay (Read: bonus counted as your salary) was obfuscated and it was impossible to see the metrics behind the scores. Pay levels were discussed in closed rooms in whispered voices and it was verboten to speak of possible career advancing points. The thing that pushed me over the edge was learning that a college hire made more money than me even though my experienced dwarfed him (and I had graduated with a similar major).
Ultimately yes, privacy at IBM was a good thing, but brought with it just as many evils.
--Chag
Where I work they don't even check up on how many hours you work.
Then again I'm working through the University, so they probably could get access to my school records, and I'm only making $9 an 'hour'
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Right on.
...so once upon a time, IBM had a monopoly - meaning, market power. Of course they acted as any company would in those circumstances.
Now they don't, so they adapt to a changed business environment. IBM does not support Linux because it gives their top bosses a warm fuzzy feeling inside. They support Linux because they see big money in it, long-term.
Note: I'm a free-market economist, so I see this as a Good Thing.
As someone who relies upon medicine from Eli Lilly to keep me alive from day to day, I think it's a very good thing that they have background checks in place.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Another ex-Big Blue employee. I started out in Lotus though and was then assimilated by the borg corporation.
In truth, they did not spy on us, but I had to open my laptop bag every day going in and out of the building so that security could check the serial number on it. And I had to secure my laptop on the table with a weird cable. And I couldn't/shouldn't work from home. And they wanted to take away my company car.
So, I left...
.sig
At Dell, they are always watching you. That is, they use SMS management installed on all Win9x (2K and XP as well) to take snapshot photos of all desktop PCs. In fact, I had at least 5 known shots taken of mine while working (you can tell when the screen refreshes). A co-worker I know says that they will once in awhile have one or two people in IT dedidicated to surveillance. If you get cought with questionable content displayed, your manager will be notified. Of course, the key word is "questionable" because browsing CNN.com is frowned apon as lost productivity.
Life is not for the lazy.
They had cameras in ever corner of the room. Then again the helpdesk I worked on was a showcase for clients. They would show the clients the helpdesk from remote locations through the cameras. The problem with this was that we were not allowed to have ANYTHING but the computer, phone, and a notebook on the desk. It sucked, but at least you could tell when the camera was on (it wasn't pointed at the wall behind it).
It's a good thing the world sucks or we'd all fall off.
I also worked at a Bank before 9/11. There was massive surveillance of its employees. Ebay? You're fired. Talk about looking for another job? You're fired. Using Hotmail or Yahoo for personal email? You're fired. That bank lost a major lawsuit for videotaping the bathrooms in that West Palm Beach headquarters. They still videotape it: the "winners" of the lawsuit also got fired. They had a security department devoted to listening to phone calls, watching your email and snooping your web tracks. Being hired to develop software with Visual Studio, my first task was to hack the locked down NT boxes (wow, padlocks on the floppy drives! C2 is a joke) because Visual Studio was not on the approved software list. And of course, after a few months, the software audit showed unapproved software on the computer, so I was fired. LMAO.
Background checks for employees probably got a big boost after the tylenol tampering case. I am sure that some disgruntled employees have flicked boogers into the medicine before it gets bottled or tabletized. I am sure you have seen the "real tv" shows with the surveillance footage of some guy urinating into a coffee pot at the office. Could your company afford to make 100,000,000,000 pills with urine in them?
I'm a current IBM employee. And yes, the rules are pretty strict about leaving stuff out unattended. But you have to remember we have a zillion different customers from all over the world. Some of them, like major banks, governments, etc, tend to stipulate a certain level of general security "cleanliness" as part of their contract. When security is a habit, you don't make dumb mistakes. When you only do it when you remember you're on a sensitive projuect, you're more likely to slip.
It's a pain, but you adjust quickly. I have a locked drawer on my desk. End of the day, everything paper on my desk goes in my desk. The next day, stuff comes out as I need it. Every coupla months, the drawer gets full. And all that semi-sensitive stuff goes en-masse to the confidential recycling bin. Clean office, and no slip-up's from double stakcing papers, etc...
my friend just graduated college from IU as an analytical chemist; he just got a job at Lilly and having been an Indiana native (it's based here; one of the states largest employers)everyone knows about lilly (hell i even own some stock)
they required a huge background check, a stringent drug test (no detox is gonna get you outta this one) and several interviews and when they found out he had been arrested for disorderly conduct (drunk at a party) they wanted to see a copy of the police report too... the fact is that prior to this i didn't and this story i didn't know anything about their practices; that in and of itself is suspect as people who enjoy working where they work talk as much as those who don't...
now that's just what little he's told me about it; we dont' talk that often i can only imagine the rest and what it must be like working there. and to be listed #1 on the big brother list it has to be something out of an Ashcroft wet dream.
I've got an acquaintance at Lily who's been partially sucked into their Collective. He's been told that the company expected their workers to report back any gossip -- particularly negative gossip -- about their products.
Now, wait a minute, you're thinking. It's not inconceivable that in doing so it could help to seal your next step up (hopefully) within the company, but it's been made pretty clear that (at least in his division) your life is the Company's, and vice-versa. A career, if you will.
It was just a little too scary to hear.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
Only becuase we are not minors are we able to have any expectation to privacy. Very bizarre if you ask me.
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
There are a lot of managers out there. A relatively few number of them actually have any special training, most within IBM have special training. An MBA alone doesn't turn you in to a good manager or executive. IBM knows that and they have a process of creating good managers and execs, just like the military has a process of creating officers. People from the engineering career path decide to become managers, they go through training than then they are managers. At other companies it's an over night process, one day a guy is a senior software engineer and the next he's a manager. Subsequently, the MBAs I've had to deal with who weren't manager tended to be assholes who thought of themselves in a completely different light that the worker bees (just by virtue they should be paid more, drive a BMW and give orders, not all of them but an alarming number of them were that way) and those engineers come managers that I've worked with desparately wanted a number to quantify employee performance without actually knowing how the employees were doing. They either micro managed and their employees could only ever fail because they "could never do it as good as the boss" or they were left totally hands off and the boss had no idea who did what, when or why. At IBM my bosses trusted my judgement, they worked within that, they protected me, they asked my advice on technical matters, they dealt with politics, they were enablers and at the end of each year they had a pretty good idea why I worked for them, what I brought to the table, how i needed to improve and how I was of value; they knew the skill-set that I had and at times they moved me to better match that or to grow those skills in directions I desired. Also at IBM if you screw up, it goes to your manager, you surf porn and it's your manager that hears about it and sees the report, except for a few major offenses it's usually put in to your boss' hands when you do something wrong. Who better knows what the circumstances may be? Who better to judge your value to the company when you screw up?
I think the classic example was a coworker who got caught drinking in his car at lunch time. He was just sitting out there drinking from the bottle, it was a flat violation of policy (I think booze is semi okay at IBM now, they have beer at some functions) well as it turns out his wife had left him the night before. He could have been fired, HR at a midsized company may have just fired him. His manager had a talk with him, gave him a repremand, explained that it can't happen again and didn't fire him. Offered to get him enrolled in some alchohol classes or rehab and at that point this person essentially started to rebuild his life that had just been falling apart.
Now there are always problems, but IBM is a company that is built on trust and when the right people are in the right places and the trust is there they are a very very powerful company and a very difficult company to compete with. They've been around nearly 100 years and I expect them to be around another if they keep to these practices. They are a company to emulate in many ways and the ways they manage and trust their employees is one of them.
Last time I checked, the phrase "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated..." pretty much is what gives us the right to privacy.
'Course, that's a restriction on the government, not private business.
I'm the only IT guy here....so i'm the one that gets called to monitor email, web traffic, voicemail...etc. I do it because it's my job. The day I get asked to perform a body cavity search, I quit.
To get this job I had to be fingerprinted, submit to a background check, take a piss test, and take countless immunizations and tests. Why? Because parents do not want child-molesting, drug-dealing, TB-infected people working around their children.
Makes sense to me.
-ted
I work for IBM which is why this will be anonymous. IBM may be fine as long as you only work at an IBM office but the majority of their workforce is in the field and IBM will bend over backwards for clients no matter how agregious their policies. For instance I work as a field tech and one of our clients for Point Of Sales equipment is GAP Inc. Well the Gap and their other retail stores has a policy of routinely searching the bags and persons of their employees as they leave the store. We field techs were told that we were to submit to these same procedures and that we should not raise any complaints about it! I told my boss and my dispatcher not to assign me to any of these calls because I would refuse to submit. I can't imagine being forced to submit to that every day. Hell I just walk past the idiot security guys at places like Best Buy. I will not allow them to assume I am a crook for shopping or working at their stores.