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One-Third Of Companies Monitoring Email
dotpavan writes "While studies have shown that spying on workers tends to make them less productive, that hasn't stopped approximately 1/3 of all U.S. companies from employing email monitoring tools. 43% of those companies employ staff to check outgoing emails. This seems like quite a waste. While there are some times when it makes sense to monitor emails (or it's required by law), most of the time, this seems like a complete waste of money. Not only are you upsetting workers and decreasing productivity, the benefits are pretty hard to spot. The number of "problem" emails tends to be incredibly low. If someone really wants to send out inappropriate emails, they're going to figure out some other way to do so, such as via a free webmail account somewhere. Yet, the companies are buying up expensive tools and hiring staff to watch just in case they catch the one or two problematic emails that go over the corporate network."
Is here: http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/12/02/HNmanage rsmisuse_1.html?source=rss&url=http://www.infoworl d.com/article/04/12/02/HNmanagersmisuse_1.html/
is that you can legally get access to the sent and recieved email of graduate students, faculty, and staff at state runs schools under some open information act. Yeah, it's happened in my department.
What I find interesting is the distinction between email and phone use. It's illegal in many states -- may even be federal law for all I know -- to listen in on employee phone communication. Why doesn't email deserve this same protection?
"Thank you for calling Widget inc... this call may be recorded for quality control purposes. "
The rule of thumb in America at least is you can record telephone conversations so long as either one or both parties are aware it's being recorded depending on the state that is.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
"While studies have shown that spying on workers tends to make them less productive, that hasn't stopped approximately 1/3 of all U.S. companies from employing email monitoring tools. 43% of those companies employ staff to check outgoing emails.
The "study" referenced does not address eletronic monitoring of employees.
The paper is about trusting employees to work from home and other "remote" locations. Evidently, Microsoft doesn't feel that employers should feel the need to physically watch over their employees - perhaps because remote office work could be beneficial to Microsoft's bottom line.
To claim that this paper is an academic study referring to the negative aspects of corporate electronic monitoring is way off base. Instead, it smells like a Microsoft whitepaper promoting Microsoft products within UK employees' homes.
carry around a copy of putty on a usb drive. if you're using a windoze machine at work, insert the usb drive, fire up putty, and secure shell to a machine that will allow you to send as much email as you please.
this also assumes that you have shell access somewhere. but don't we all?
of course they could go ape shit and block port 25 on you.
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Cryillic characters are great for bypassing those automated systems. There's a Cryillic 'i', so you can say shit with impunity :-)
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There's a specific exception in federal law that grants explicit permission for companies to monitor the lines they provide in the course of normal business. There are a number of articles that outline the business telephone exceptions in wiretapping.
A number of states have implemented legislation which require the employer to notify the employee that the lines are for business use only and may be monitored. This is typically covered in an employment agreement under a blanket statement.
Idiot, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant
that hasn't stopped approximately 1/3 of all U.S. companies from employing email monitoring tools.
Why not link to the source for your source (login)? The ITFacts.biz story got it wrong anyway: "33% of US companies monitor employees' e-mail" is wrong--the direct quote was "Almost 33 percent of 140 North American businesses..." You and ITFacts were off wrt the number and the sample. Oh, and the Tribune article was merely a syndicated column, using data from a nearly year-old study. Not exactly news. Where did I find that out? Look, it's ITFacts.biz! Yep, TFA was a double post.
Let's continue because we are not done fixing your post:
43% of those companies employ staff to check outgoing emails.
Wrong. It's "more than 43%" of companies with over 20,000 employees (not 43% of monitoring companies), according to the study. The one-third figure expands the sample to include all companies.
It is also worth noting that the study in question was sponsored by ProofPoint, which in fact sells monitoring software. So you could say that Forrester had a financial interest in high-balling the figure (which it appears they did, with all this "almost 33%" business).
There's a small possibility
Dude, doing something like that is going to show up soooo easily on the systems I use to monitor the various firewalls at our perimeter. It is very likely that I do not even have the ports/protocols opened that you need to connect to your home system from your desk at work.
If I caught you purposely building a tunnel to your home PC (which then provides an avenue for worms on your home machine to attack the corporate network), you would not be employed much longer.
If you have a high-paying job that you love, I'd go easy on the "I'm building a secret VPN tunnel to my home network" thing. If you are just a peon and you can get another $10/hr job the same day they fire you, then ignore what I said above.
-s