Slashdot Mirror
US Firms Read Employee E-mail On a Massive Scale
An anonymous reader writes "In its fifth annual study of outbound e-mail and data loss prevention issues, Proofpoint found that 41% of the largest companies surveyed (those with 20,000 or more employees) reported that they employ staff to read or otherwise analyze the contents of outbound e-mail. 22% of these companies said they employ staff primarily or exclusively for this purpose."
It may be just me, but I get really suspicious when a company in any business sponsors a survey and then uses the results to justify their own existence.
Particularly for the Slashdot crowd? Hell, a portion of the readership is probably responsible for helping to implement such measures.
Don't use your work email for personal stuff. It was never a good idea, and it's becoming ever less of a good idea. Don't say anything in an email that you wouldn't say in person or in writing. Be professional.
Also, don't forward chain letters, don't send around forwards of kitten pictures, pr0n, jokes, political screeds, etc. etc. Most people don't want to get it and you're wasting bandwidth.
I hope people realize this is evidence of how reasonable it is for a company do monitor your e-mail rather than acting like they are being violated. You can't chat online with babes all day.
Whale
It's that really big Company, AMERI CO. the one I have a lifetime contract with. When they check my emails, thats where I draw the line.
I would imagine that that breaks down to 100% running scanners against email and maybe looking at flagged messages and 0% routine reading of email.
Given the tedium of slogging through just my own email, you couldn't pay me to spend all day doing that for other people.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
problem solved.
wow, talk about a non-issue.
Gone!
And how long did you stay there? If it was more than 2 weeks past however long it took to find another job, you're a sucker. No offense, but that's some super-duper bullshit treatment.
Of course companies are going to monitor information being sent out over their internet connections. They would be crazy not to. Want privacy? Email on your own time and your own dime.
Power does not corrupt - power attracts the corrupt.
The shadiest thing they could possibly do is to monitor your email and not disclose it.
If they are disclosing that they monitor your use of their resources, you can choose if you are willing to put up with it or not.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
At work it's ok to chat with friends, in moderation, as long at the work gets done.
Even with that policy though, when I chat with my wife or friends when I'm at work, I use Off The Record to encrypt my conversations.
It helps that my wife and brother Adium which already had it installed, and that I use a Linux at work which has packages in the repository.
And when I do send emails from work it's from Gmail, and always with https.
I figure that the work email is for work stuff, and they can monitor their business stuff all they want. For my personal stuff, it's personal and I'm not going to give them the chance.
https://www.facebook.com/digitizeicm -- Show your support for the digitization of the Iron County Miner newspaper archiv
Small companies? One admin who does email in addition to everything else. Mid-sized companies? There's prolly one, maybe two dedicated admins, and they're more interested in using your emails as a means to track SMTP problems than in reading what's in 'em.
Large corps? Heh - you're just begging for attention if you start flinging around abnormal-looking SMTP traffic; esp. in really big companies that get a touch paranoid about such things as corporate espionage.
You'd be better off risking the attention of the proxy-minders with webmail than by dicking around with encryption on your email client. Using the proggies you linked to also tends to stick up like a sore thumb in any workstation app auditing... and you could conceivably get fired faster for loading unauthorized software onto your corp-issued equipment than a quickie email to your girlfriend describing in graphic detail at what you want to do to her when you get home.
Besides, most email admins have better things to do than grep emails (e.g. battle spam, figure out and fix bounces from remote mis-configured servers, curse at Verizon's RFP-non-compliant configs, keep enough inodes handy in /var, pound the load averages down to something sane, beg the powers-that-be for decent equipment, etc).
Unless your corp specifically has good reason to be ultra-anal about security (e.g. gov't contractors, Microsoft/Intel/IBM-sized corps, etc), then monitoring user emails with anything beyond simple log and traffic grepping tools is a waste of resources and time. Any company that spends more time watching their employees than their customers is a company that isn't long for the world these days.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
What makes you think the next place will be any better? So long as this sort of thing is legal/unregulated, you can assume every employer will do this in the name of productivity/competitiveness/because they can. If you're lucky you'll find a company that understands how treating your employees like human beings until it's proven that they're causing a problem is better than automatically assuming everyone is a lazy lying scumbag.
I also have to point out that the people who do actual work are the ones impacted by this sort of bullshit. Executives don't get disciplined/fired for sending a three-line email to their spouses unless one of the other executives wants them gone for some reason.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Large corps? Heh - you're just begging for attention if you start flinging around abnormal-looking SMTP traffic; esp. in really big companies that get a touch paranoid about such things as corporate espionage.
There is an implied point here that deserves highlighting.
The people who are employed specifically to analyse outgoing mail, aren't looking for you emailing your girlfriend during working hours, forwarding chain letters, or calling your boss names. They're looking for the folks whose "inappropriate" mail will cost the company big $$$$ - corporate espionage, sexual harassment, etc.
Most people will never be in position to be monitored thus, because they'll just never be "important" enough.
Any company that feels the need to monitor their employees that closely without a really compelling need is not going to last long. (I define compelling need as something on the order of national security, building weapons systems, guarding highly valuable financial assets, or similar activities) If they can't ask you for results and trust you to go get them, that isn't a working relationship that is going to be productive.
I always told my employees that as long as they got their work done with good quality and on time, we would get along just fine. If they abused that trust they might get a warning but only once. And you know what? It worked. I've had very little turnover and high morale and my employees really worked hard. Sending a few innocuous emails to a significant other doesn't qualify as a breach of trust. Looking at porn in the workplace would be a firing offense. It's really all about what is reasonable.
reading the posts here definitely reminds me of numerous scenes from the 1985 movie, Brazil...
And I'd totally have left to go to an office that cares about productivity and not how or when their developers are working.
Also, Tor and/or encryption.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Maybe you need to focus on tightening your hiring process.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
What I still don't get is why things like web surfing etc. are necessarily always seen as bad by companies. I mean... sure, if you're a grunt who gets paid to mop floors or so, your employer won't want you to do anything else on company time; but if you're an engineer, a programmer, a designer or so, someone who's paid to THINK, then it really should be obvious that keeping you happy and motivated is the way to go.
And that's doubly true given that you can't force people to be creative - if they're burnt out, they're burnt out, end of story. It's better to allow them to recharge and relax a bit than it is to drive them on with the (metaphorical) whip - you're not going to get anywhere, anyway.
Ever wonder why Google is so successful? Here's a hint: corporate culture and motivation.
Well, the companies keep telling us "don't expect a job for life" and now we don't, they realise that means looking for a new (better) job is a long-term continual process and NOW they don't like it.
I work in a smaller business (one of those shops where I'm the only only doing both the email administration and pretty much all the other computer-related stuff). What I tend to see is employees *receiving* non work-related material, not so much SENDING it.
Some employees don't even have a home computer with Internet access, so all their friends start sending their "funny photos", jokes, and so forth to the only contact address they can find for the person - the work email.
You *could* "blacklist" those people from sending you things, but come on! These are the employee's friends or relatives. They really don't want to block everything they might send them, because sometimes it's relevant or useful.
I agree with much of what you're saying. But I'd also point out that email *filtering* and *archiving* are two vastly different things.
It seems to me that practically all of the issues you're bringing up could be handled successfully by retaining good email backups, going back for a reasonable length of time?
Our company doesn't do anything special in the way of attempting to read employee's emails or filter their content. But we DO have backup systems that dump copies of all the mailboxes onto nightly backups, and we keep a couple alternating "month end" tapes, plus a "year end" tape that's archived away.
This way, if something actually comes up, there's a decent amount of supporting email evidence that can be retrieved for that specific situation.
Otherwise, employees have a general expectation that nobody's monitoring their daily email correspondence in a "big brother" fashion.
What I still don't get is why things like web surfing etc. are necessarily always seen as bad by companies.
...
... Here's a hint: corporate culture and motivation
:-) Google pretty much has a dot bomb culture. I think the spectacular success of one instance of a dot bomb culture is distracting you from the many failures. It is premature to say that Google's success is due to anything beyond a brilliant idea at the right time combined with rich angel investors. Their initial success and its continued dividends allows them to afford many inefficiencies, perhaps many elements of their cultures fit into this area. Keep in mind that success can hide inefficiency and that the true causes of success are sometimes erroneously attributed.
Note that the original poster wrote 'I stopped "special" surfing at the office'. There is a pretty high probability that this is referring to porn. Tolerating employees visiting porn sites is one way a company can get sued. Of course while the solution described in this article is cool and amusing, it is probably another way to get a company sued.
Ever wonder why Google is so successful?
Inertia mostly. They had a brilliant idea a while ago and have refined it since then to maintain competitiveness. Google has done many cool things since then but they are mostly a drain on success or neutral, some mild successes, but no big successes outside the original domain. Also, it is doubtful Google allows employees to browse porn sites either. With their deep pockets their fears regarding law suits are going to be pretty high.
Clue: "Law of Small Numbers", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasty_generalization.
Now at least one element of Google culture, allowing employees the time to work on pet projects that many benefit the company, may have a proven track record. 3M allowed this for decades and many useful products emerged. Google may follow 3M's lead, but it is a little early to pass judgement.
You'd be surprised. Some contractors did something like this at my company in order to use IM software and read external email. They were quickly found out by our admins, and told to knock it off or they would get terminated. And this is a very big company.
All of this makes me wonder if anyone has ever heard of SSH! Whenever I'm away from home, I just SSH into my own computer with X forwarding enabled. Bam! I can do just about anything I do at home on another computer and my tracks are pretty much covered.
HTTPS is not protection against an intelligent network appliance. I know this because my company employs an appliance that sits in stream that identifies the originating HTTPS connection and intercepts the key that is supposed to be passed back to the client. Instead what happens is the network app creates a bogus key that it passes back to the client and maintains the encrypted relationship with the target website directly. What the client gets back is NOT the encryption from the website... it's spoofed encryption. That allows the appliance to read everything it wants that is being communicated between the two points.
The concept of network security is about as effective as the concept of airport security.
Correspondence from your work e-mail is no different from paper mail on company letterhead. The company owns what has its name on it and what's composed on company time.
But some companies might be better off putting that kind of effort into quality control on the *products* they send out, rather than correspondence.
If somebody sues for sexual harassment, etc, porn surfing in the office would be used as red flag evidence that the company tolerated or facilitated a hostile work environment for women.