Reporting on Your Employees' Internet Access?

kooky45 asks: "My team has recently installed content filters for my company which restrict the web sites that employees can visit. It also logs the sites they do visit; not whole URLs, just the site domain names. This has been useful for a couple of disciplinary investigations of employees suspected of wrongdoing. However, word has got round to some managers that this capability exists. They are starting to ask my team to provide lists of sites that their team members have accessed over the past few weeks, claiming they are suspicious of time wasting on the Internet and need proof. We're pushing back because of privacy concerns but the pressure is building on us. We have no experience in this area, and I'd like to ask Slashdot how other companies handle this, what the important considerations are, and where it could all go wrong?"

Comments

Re:We do this.

[Noodles_HK]

Ditto. However, we do perfer that the request is sent by a "director" level manager before we send out the report, so that more the one person knows about the existance of a particular report concerning a particular employee. We don't jump for anyone who has some type of supervisory title / job function.

This goes for granting read access to other's email.

Give them an inch

[porkThreeWays]

Basically, as someone else said, these sorts of things should be funnelled through your HR dept. Any investigation that could result in disicipline of an employee should go through HR. It isn't up to you guys to determine what requests are legit or not. There needs to be a central channel that all investigitory requests concerning employees has to go through. 99% of the time that's an HR dept. If a union got wiff of what's going on, you might be in the beating end of the union stick.