Pornographic Spam And The Workplace

dolo666 writes "The BBC posted an article about how UK legal experts are warning businesses to take a more active role in the prevention of pornographic spam. If you get an explicit email, how exactly do you show it to your boss, without looking guilty yourself?"

Comments

A good first measure...

[Ieshan]

A good first measure, especially if you are the guilty party, is to sign your boss up for lots of porn mailing lists.

Then, he/she will know it's perfectly normal to get up to 10 penis enlargement spams a day, and it has nothing to do with the way you surf the internet.

It's a joke, laugh.

Re:A good first measure...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you present this as a joke?
It's quite clever, I would do it to my boss

heh

[revmoo]

Pornographic spam is quite a problem...

Anyone remember farm sluts?

Re:heh

[vegetablespork]

Farm Sluts was an outstanding piece of cinema. I kept a copy of that and it still makes me laugh violently when I watch it.

This is a good thing

[HolyCoitus]

If this applies to companies in the US at all, does anyone have the emails to all the employees at SCO? Get Linux out of the hot seat by forcing their legal team to deal with all the cases their employees will bring against them!

Sadly enough, I would not be amazed if this underhanded tactic would actually work...

You hire resonable admins

[ivanmarsh]

We monitor ALL traffic entering and exiting our network.

We don't hassle people about porno spam or the occasional mis-navigation to www..com. It's pretty obvious when someone is really surfing porn or doing anything else inappropriate.

Re:You hire resonable admins

[ivanmarsh]

What a dork... I just truncated my own post...

That should also read:

We very clearly outline net useage and who's responsible for what in our employee handbook.

That way the responsibility goes both ways.

Re:You hire resonable admins

[Celvin]

We don't hassle people about porno spam or the occasional mis-navigation to www..com.

You obvioulsy didn't read the article... This is about some guy meaning that companies can expect lawsuits from employees because the company doesn't do enough to protect their employees from spam...

I'm not pro spam in any way, but this is crazy!

Re:You hire resonable admins

[Havokmon]

We monitor ALL traffic entering and exiting our network.

Next time, hire responsible employees, and you won't have to waste your time and money monitoring them.

Re:You hire resonable admins

[ivanmarsh]

If you don't KNOW what's going on on your network you're a fool. There's no such thing as a responsible employee.

Re:You hire resonable admins

[Havokmon]

If you don't KNOW what's going on on your network you're a fool. There's no such thing as a responsible employee.

Except your confusing the type of traffic with the content of traffic. (Web browising vs Porn Browsing)

Paranoia is fine if you have an unlimited budget, and your employees don't merely avoid your expensive monitoring equipment anyways. (Laptops, wireless connections, etc)

You can't point fingers and call names unless you know the situation. If it costs more to monitor employees from stealing pens and making personal copies on the copier than it costs you in pens and toner, it's not worth the cost in dollars and employee morale.

Re:You hire resonable admins

[ivanmarsh]

You make a lot of assumptions.

I monitor traffic as well as payload. The system I use is all open source and cost me nothing.

Re:You hire resonable admins

[Havokmon]

I monitor traffic as well as payload. The system I use is all open source and cost me nothing.

Time is also money. Open Source is great, but doesn't address employee morale. Of course, neither does commercial software.

IMHO, active employee monitoring on-par with allowing drinks at your desk.

Re:You hire resonable admins

[Frisky070802]

Unfortunately, it's clear that while most employees will be responsible, at least in some environments, there are always the exceptions. I imagine that the threat of monitoring, as long as it's known to have teeth, is sufficient to keep down the abuse. Simply having a motd that reminds people they're subject to monitoring may not do it.

Kind of like the RIAA suing grandmothers and 13-year-olds in an attempt to get everyone else to realize they might just get sued too. Whether a porn surfer at work, or a "music pirate," it changes the threshold for some people to change their behavior. Others won't give a damn.

Re:You hire resonable admins

[iamacat]

A "reasonable" sysadmin monitoring porn is like a reasonable janitor searching your drawyers for copies of your resume.

Your job should be to ensure performance and security of the network. Keep a log of URLs for investigation purposes, but don't go snooping "just because" and delete after a week. If anyone is causing technical problems with their use, approach them on these grounds. If there is a complaint about employee X offended because employee Y is browsing porn, tell Y you expect him to be an adult and stop without any technological measures and tell X to let you know if there is still a problem.

If you get another complaint, then yes pull the log and this time Y should be really in hot water because he ignored a warning which is so easy to follow. On the other hand, if Y has an office and people don't automatically see his screen, inquire about the length X went through to get offended.

Honestly though - we have some socially conservative female employees from Asian countries and they are just snickering if they catch someone looking at pr0n. Did you hire some nut cases or are they really complaining about some more serious harassment and pr0n is just easier to define/prove?

Employer's responsibility ?

[drsmithy]

"This is an obvious case where employers are directly liable to their employees," said net law expert Dr Brian Bandey.

I don't think it's clear at all. Should an employer be responsible because someone decides to randomly mail dead-tree copies of porn magazines to their employees ? Or because some individual decides to make a random sexually explicit phone call to one of their phone numberS ?

(IANAL, if in the above situations employers *are* supposed to be responsible, then it's just another good example of the stupidity of the law.)

Re:Employer's responsibility ?

[gl4ss]

well.. if they started receiving pornographic flyers because they worked where they did, then sure. if it's a sure bet that you'll get harassing flyers if you work at someplace and your not informed about it when you take the job.. i could see something there.

now.. as it seems to be the case that if you have an email account you will get pornographic spam.. and your employer forces(you need it to do your work) you to use email..

of course as things are the employer can never catch(currently) the guys sending those pron spams(and ultimately get the people responsible for it into court themselfs).
-

Re:Employer's responsibility ?

[multimed]

INAL but it seems to me that at least in the US, employers are responsible for providing a safe (both physically and mental/emotionally) workplace. If there's a boss who's abusive and the company knows about it and doesn't do anything, they're liable. Seems to me the same thing here, if the company knows it's employees are getting spam that is upsetting/disturbing and does nothing about it, they're not providing a save work environment and should be liable. Obviously not all spam can be stopped, but they should be required to at least do some filtering to cut down on spam if it a problem at their company.

The Water Cooler

[GuyMannDude]

If you get an explicit email, how exactly do you show it to your boss, without looking guilty yourself?

Silly! You don't show this to your boss! If I were you, I'd let the issue "bubble up" to management without putting a bullseye on my shirt. How to do this? Use the time-honored method of watercooler smalltalk.

Yeah, you know what I'm talking about. You met your coworkers there any chat about whatever. Occasionally you use that time to tentatively throw out an issue that bugs you and see if anyone else latches on to it.

Bob: 'Morning Guy. 'Morning Sally.
Sally: 'Morning boys!
Guy: Hey everyone. How's things going?
Bob: I just spent an hour cleaning up the code after that asshat Maurice committed a bunch of stuff that caused compiler warnings. Sure, they're not strictly errors but still we should strive to write good code. That really bugs me.
Sally: Yeah? Well I got to work 30 minutes late today because there was an accident. It had been moved well off the road so there wasn't any reason for a slowdown in traffic. Except, of course, the fact that every little shithead had to gawk at other people's misery. *That* is what really bugs me.
Guy: You know what really bugs me? All that goat porn spam that floods my Inbox. I mean, I like to look at naked girls like everyone but that stuff is sick! You know what I'm talking about?
Bob: *cough*
Sally: Um, I've got to go. Just remembered a meeting I'm supposed to be at. See you later, Bob.

Mark my words: a few watercooler conversations like this and sooner or later word of the problem will trickle on up to management.

Hope this helps,
GMD

Re:The Water Cooler

[SeanAhern]

Yeah? Well I got to work 30 minutes late today because there was an accident. It had been moved well off the road so there wasn't any reason for a slowdown in traffic. Except, of course, the fact that every little shithead had to gawk at other people's misery. *That* is what really bugs me.

I know it's a joke...

But you should tell Sally about Traffic Waves. It's not about gawking, mostly.

Re:The Water Cooler

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I've noticed that effect. Another effect I've noticed is that a yawn tends to oscillate back and forth over the same hundred feet or so of a two-lane road/highway (a four-lane or wider is too wide for the effect, strangely...)

Re:The Water Cooler

[Lxy]

A local radio station coined the term gawker slowdown. It's amazing to me how many of these things you'll see on the road. Traffic literally backed up for miles because of people stopping to stare at even the smallest of accidents.

Accordign to that radio station, the only accepable instance of a gawker slowdown is a care fire (carbeque). Something about a car engolfed in flames requires a gawk.

Re:The Water Cooler

[Anonymous Coward]

Traffic Waves is a site of amateur observations that really shouldn't be taken as fact. But you're right about it not being gawking. Some of the other stuff there is crap, though.

What it's really about...

[temojen]

Read the article...

It seems anti-spam vendors are saying companies could be sued for emotional damage if they don't block spam.

I don't know about the UK courts, but I could just see this one going to court in Canada...

Plaintiff: Someone outside the company emailed me an ad for porn and it hurt my feelings so much I suffered a financial loss.
Judge: You clearly have psychological issues that are not the fault of your employer. Seek counselling. Case Dismissed.


IANAL

Re:What it's really about...

[Clever Pun]

'course, in America, the judge would probably blame the company, and award the plaintiff a huge cash sum.

yeah, i know.

Well "duh"

[MImeKillEr]

If you get an explicit email, how exactly do you show it to your boss, without looking guilty yourself?

C'mon, how is this a difficult question?

You simply forward the email headers to your IT department (ok, not all but someone you're confident is capable of handling it) and strip the offending images/text. CC: your boss for good measure and state in the email that you received a bit of junkmail with nudity/etc.

Jeeze.

Re:Well "duh"

[GuyMannDude]

The part about "looking guilty yourself" refers to the fact that many bosses are going to blame you for being on the spammers email list. As stated in the article, there are plenty of reasons (not necessarily good ones) for assuming that receiving pornographic spam is the end result of visiting porn sites on company time. A lot of bosses aren't even aware of the email harvesting that spam-bots do. If you start telling your boss "I'm receiving a lot of porno spam" and no one else is telling them that, a typical PHB -- consciously or unconscously looking to minimze their work and/or liability -- is going to assume you're the only one receiving this stuff. It has nothing to do with forwarding the actual content to your superior.

GMD

Re:Well "duh"

[MImeKillEr]

That's just it -- forwarding it to the local IT guy (unless you're the type of user that makes an ass of himself) explaining that you haven't a clue as to where they got your email, etc would be enough to CYA.

As for "assuming that receiving pornographic spam is the end result of visiting porn sites on company time" - uhm, simply visiting a pr0n site while on the clock isn't going to instantly give someone your email address.

Re:Well "duh"

[johnkoer]

Don't forget to cc your home address, so you can look at it later :)

Re:Well "duh"

[RocketSHE]

Not CC:. BCC:

Re:Well "duh"

[Lord Kano]

Before I left my previous employer, I made sure that I got copies of EVERYONE'S email address in my department. Including the address that is forwarded to every employee in the company.

Anyone want to make me an offer?

question

[Naikrovek]

If you get an explicit email, how exactly do you show it to your boss, without looking guilty yourself?

why would you be showing your boss your spam?

* delete it upon arrival
* use some spam filtering software of some sort, forward the spam to him/her
* don't let your work email get onto the internet unless you're ready for lots of porn spam
* virtually everyone gets porn spam, don't worry too much.

Re:question

[ignorant_newbie]

* don't let your work email get onto the internet unless you're ready for lots of porn spam

yeah, cause email is just so damned useful without the internet. reading the output of cron all day keeps me so interested.

come on, guys - internet != web. if you mean web, say web.

This may sound like a stupid troll, but how many of your relatives call their computer "hard drive" ?. We can only educate ignorant people if we show them they sound ignorant.

Re:question

[elemental23]

Actually the word "internet" is appropriate there. Before the popularity of the web spammers were harvesting e-mail addresses from Usenet so, in this context, "internet" means the web, Usenet, and anywhere else that addresses can be harvested (eg, AOL chat rooms, etc).

Re:question

[Random832]

AOL chat rooms are not part of the internet. you must be thinking of IRC

It seems only fair

[ariehk]

1)The UK's new and shiny anti-spam legislation will only protect personal inboxes, not those of businesses. This effectively means that workers have not legal protection against inbox pornography

2) Anyone with a corporate email address that's been around for a while is likely to get 90% spam or more, assuming the company doesn't filter their mail. Especially as these are often unmunged on the web.

3) You have to read your email to do your job.

In other words, employees have no choice but to look at porn in order to do their work. In that situation, the primary duty of the company is to care for their employees. My university account gets tonnes of explicit email, some of which (like bestiality) is still sort of illegal in the UK. If I had to read it to do my job, i'd be pretty pissed off.

Long run, I hope companies will try and pass any incurred costs to the spammers themselves via civil action. Hopefully, it'll help unite the business community against spam.

Re:It seems only fair

[Yottabyte84]

I simply turn off HTML email. It's not that hard. We get bucketloads of spam, but the images don't show up, because I read mail in plaintext, and havew it set so I have to click on attached images.

Re:It seems only fair

[julesh]

You obviously don't have clients that send you colour-coded lists of requests...

Re:It seems only fair

[Yottabyte84]

Nope. If I did, I'd turn mozilla mail's simple html rendering, for messages on which it's needed.

Why just spam?

[c]

Why aren't companies liable for failing to prevent obscene phone calls? How about flyers for adult video stores left on cars in the company parking lot? Are they liable if some moron plants a hidden camera in the women's bathroom?

Yes, spam happens more frequently than any of those, but this is slashdot. Reductuo ad absurdum, baby.

My question is, how the heck can we expect people feeling mental and emotional distress from things found in e-mail to cope with the other stresses of the modern workplace?!? Are these same people going to be checking into an institution the first time they're asked to meet an tough deadline, too?

Stupidity is obscene.

c.

Re:Why just spam?

[ariehk]

Why aren't companies liable for failing to prevent obscene phone calls? How about flyers for adult video stores left on cars in the company parking lot? Are they liable if some moron plants a hidden camera in the women's bathroom?

If it happens persistantly.
If there's no way of doing your job without avoiding it.
If the company knew about it and could have stopped it.
If they chose not to.

in that case, I think it'd apply too. But that's not the issue anyway; the issue is pornography in inboxen that could be prevented with filters, or a no-image policy on the corporate mail system, or any number of other ways.

If someone regularly sent me pornographic photos to my company address - and they weren't writing to me personally, but as an employee, I'd expect the company to help me stop it. If they refuse, I think they'e liable

What is the problem?

[MeddlesomeKids]

There seems to be an implicit assumption in this topic and some of the follow up postings that if your email address is receiving pornographic email then you must have been visiting pornographic sites or partaking of pornographic services. Thus the embarassment of taking the issue to the boss.

But who believes that anymore?

I'm sure this was true for the primitive Internet inhabitants of the 90's, but this is the noughts (00s). I thought by now that everyone knew that if your email is public at all, then you will start receiving spam, and a high percentage of that spam will be porn related because a high percentage of all spam is porn related. And second that the only difference between a public and private email address is time. The longer an email address has existed, then (usually) the more exposure it has had, and thus, the more spam you receive.

So, in short, there's no issue. If you think your boss should know about or do something about your spam, tell him/her.

True Story...

[NanoGator]

About a year ago I had a nasty surprise. I cleaned out my mailbox. Once finished, I got up to get a drink. When I came back, there was a picture on the preview pane of a woman who was... involved... with a horse. Since my mailbox was clear, it displayed the first message that came up. That bothered the hell out of me. I doubt that any of the women in the office would have assumed it was porn spam if they had walked by at that moment.

Ugh. Yeah you gotta be careful. Even though I doubt I would have lost my job over it (I work with understanding people), the thought of disturbing one of my coworkers really bothers me.

Re:True Story...

[complete loony]

Similar story, a co-worker once clicked on a very innocent link (years ago, this kind of spam was fairly knew, at least to him) nothing seemed to happen immediately, got called away by the boss, and came back a couple minutes later to find a rather obsene mpeg playing on his desktop.

Re:True Story...

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean you didn't have a female (and attractive) co-worker show you the email?

I did. She showed me and another guy in the office. It was rather amusing (the circumstances, not the horse...).

Re:True Story...

[julesh]

This is just one of the reasons why e-mail preview panes are evil and should be removed from all e-mail clients. Opening an e-mail should require positive action, especially if the e-mail may be encoded using HTML or another similarly capable format that can cause your computer to take actions automatically (eg downloading an image, sending a receipt back to the sender, installing a worm...).

Re:True Story...

[pipingguy]

This is just one of the reasons why e-mail preview panes are evil and should be removed from all e-mail clients.

Exactly. Do a view source on questionable email before opening it - it's pretty easy to determine if it's junk.

Re:True Story...

[ReaperOfSouls]

Preview panes should not be removed from e-mail clients, they should be there and off by default and that setting should be saved on a folder by folder basis.

I recieve at a minimum of 500 messages a day. Preview panes make working through them very easy. I do how ever have hundreds of mail filter rules that place all of my mail in to proper folders. On folders I know will only have valid mail I use a preview pane and have it on. On anything that could contain junk, I don't.

No reason to nuter e-mail clients, just make sure the default settings are reasonable.

Silly legal problem - Silly legal answer

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get the mentality of people who make such a big fuzz about it. Yes, there is filthy spam. Yes, it may come in my inbox. Yes, I can delete it. No, my (current) boss doesn't care one way or another. No, as a sysadmin I won't waste my time checking who surfs where. No, I won't go out of my way to filter pornographic spam - to me all spam is waste of time and bandwidth. But then again, I live in Denmark, where people are uptight about other kind of things.

If the problem is that some employees will sue the company for "not protecting them", the legalistic solution must be to add a sentence in their work contract that specifies that the employee is aware that the work involves working with email, and that unfortunately some disturbing mail may arrive in his/her mailbox.

Spam filter sorts porn into spam folder - wahoo!

[Anonymous Coward]

Like the subject says, I get all my porn automatically sorted for me by our spam filter into the "spam folder". Saves me time and its an official procedure. Naturally, I have to check each email in the spam folder to make sure that it is not important (again company policy). So I get paid to look at porn!

On the bright side, I found that my bosses' boss's (VP) email was being considered spam so I informed him and asked how I could get the other VPs added to the spam list.... They didn't see the humor in it though.

We have the technology to stop it?????

[genner]

"Ed MacNair, security manager at filtering firm NetIQ, said: "I think there no excuses now because the technology is available to stop spam coming in." Who here knows of a program that can stop 100% of the spam, at best you use filters to get it down to a low trickle. Are companies to be responsible if porn leaks through the filters and offends someone?

Our mail server can block 100% of spam.

[temojen]

There are two immediately obvious options on our mail server. Halfway down the back of the case, there's a blue cable with an RJ-45 Jack, and at the top of the case there's a black cable with a 3-holed trapezoidal plug. Unplug either of these, and you'll block 100% of spam coming into the server.

Grow a skin for God's sake...

[Sylver Dragon]

Maybe its just me, but it seems that no one has any sort of skin these days. At the first sign of anything that might offend them, they scream, "sue!" Why don't people toughen up a bit and realize that they are going to be exposed to things that may be contrary to thier sensabilities? You have an email address, and its on the corporate web site? Then you should expect that its going to get spammed at some point, and some of it may be offensive. Delete it, deal with it, and move on for fucks sake! There is a great big world out there, and most of it doesn't give a tinker's damn about you. The rest of it just wants your money, if you can't handle a little bit of emotional distress now and again, how do you ever expect to survive?
Sorry for the rant, but people without the slightest bit of ability to cope with stress piss me off. I have four words for the people involved with this sort of lawsuit, FUCKING DEAL WITH IT!!!
Ah, I feel better. Please forward all complaints to: FuckYou@I.Do.Not.Care.com

Re:Grow a skin for God's sake...

[DEBEDb]

So how come you are so worked up then? :)

Re:Grow a skin for God's sake...

[Sylver Dragon]

Touche.
I think this is just one of those things that bothers me a little bit every time I see it. Its like the old "Chinese water torture", you tie a person down and let water drip on thier forehead slowly. At first its nothing, but after time and repeated drips on the exact same spot it starts to get really damned annoying.
Same thing with me and this subject, I've just finally reached the point where its getting really damned annoying. I have a pretty thick skin for the most part, but everyone has a breaking point.

Re:True Story... [OT]

[toast0]

do you know of any such clients for X? I've recently defenestrated my computer, and all of the X based clients were based on the preview pane, so I'm using Pine, which is nice and all, but having more options is always good. (I was using pegasus in windows)

Re:True Story... [OT]

[julesh]

'Fraid not. Pretty much everything has one, but most allow you to switch them off, which I would strongly recommend. Mozilla is pretty good, IME.

preview panes can be innocuous... if neutered

[Frisky070802]

A better solution to turning off preview panes, IMHO, would be to make preview panes dumber (no images, receipts, etc, but still showing text... kind of like what McAfee Spamkiller does.

Actually, Mozilla lets me toggle the preview pane, as does my new client of choice, thunderbird. But even after installing a plugin that's supposed to let me turn it on and off with a click, that seems a no-op, and I have to do it manually. Since I frown on preview for mail but find it very useful for news (only internal to my company and therefore safe), I keep going back and forth.

Why even worry about it?