Slashdot Mirror
In EU, Internet Use From Work May Be Protected
athloi wrote with a link to an Ars Technica article on a case involving the right to privacy on the internet. "A Welsh university employee has successfully sued the UK government in the EU court of human rights over monitoring of her personal internet use from work. According to the complaint, the woman's e-mail, phone, Internet, and fax usage were all monitored by the Deputy Principal (DP) of the college, who appears to have taken a sharp dislike to her. The woman claimed that her human rights were being abused, and pointed specifically to Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which governs private and family life." The courts agreed; despite a lack of a notion of 'privacy' in English law, the EU convention forced their hand. The ruling doesn't try to dissuade employers from monitoring employees, but does encourage them to inform employees about surveillance.
You shouldn't really need to monitor their browsing/e-mail unless they're not getting the results required. I'm a strong believe that employees should be judged on what they achieve, not how they achieve it. If they can view port 80% of the day and be acceptably productive, so be it.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
I'm one of those ;-). Although corporate is starting to filter out message boards and sites of that nature. In most of those cases all I have do is hit "continue" to view the site anyway.
I work in IT as a Network Administrator and most of the time I am able to fix what goes wrong in five to 10 minutes while in charge of rougly 200 computers, five server rooms, application servers, support about 160 employees...a lot of the free time I have I spend reading articles online (mainly RSS feeds).
There are so many annoying restrictions at work, that a few people I know just take their own laptops.
And if you bring your own laptop, how do you access resources on the corporate network? Please tell me that you're not connecting your network cable to your laptop while your wifi connection is enabled.
Every time that Internet usage monitoring comes up on Slashdot, all the k00l kidz post their solutions for getting around tools like Websense and restrictive firewall policies on outbound traffic. As fun as "pulling one over on The Man" can be, violating the AUP is grounds for termination. Complain all you want about being fired but at the end of the day, you'll still be unemployed.
To head-off the "Oh yeah, I'm tool l33t to work at a square company with draconian fw admins like that dude!" comments, please know that we can't afford to have people like you on the payroll. Your methods of skirting URL filtering and/or firewall policies will get the organization sued, get us into the newspaper or both. We can't afford to have that happen.
I've been there and seen it happen. Once your organization is in the newspaper for something unsavory, that kind of damage to the credibility of the organization is hard to repair. The old saying goes "There's no such thing as bad publicity." Well, there *is* bad publicity and it can be quite costly.