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Employee Monitoring
CWmike writes "Michael Workman, an associate professor at the Florida Institute of Technology's Nathan M. Bisk College of Business, estimates that monitoring responsibilities take up at least 20% of the average IT manager's time. Yet most IT professionals never expected they'd be asked to police their colleagues and co-workers in quite this way. How do they feel about this growing responsibility? Workman says he sees a split among tech workers. Those who specialize in security issues feel that it's a valid part of IT's job. But those who have more of a generalist's role, such as network administrators, often don't like it. Computerworld contributor Tam Harbert found a wide variety of viewpoints from IT managers, ranging from discomfort at having to 'babysit' employees to righteous beliefs about 'protecting the integrity of the system.'"
Society is growing used to more extensive monitoring overall. We monitor our babies with webcams. The webcams are then used in schools to monitor class rooms and playgrounds. When we grow up, we rename them security cameras and appoint low wage individuals as our watchmen.
In some areas of the world such as the UK, computers are already being used to analyze the images from the security cameras. Storage capacity grows, and data gathered from the image analysis are stored for a lifetime. They can be used to enhance the analysis of your children's children. The ones which protests are considered suspicious with "something to hide". The ruling class are the only ones exempt from monitoring.
In the next step, computers are used to analyse images from private bedrooms and bathrooms. After all, who needs to worry about privacy when it's only a computer watching. It's all about protecting us from the boogey man. Think of the children!
Resistance is futile. You will be monitored.
Tell your friends about xenu.net
"He goes through the logs to see if there's anything in there that needs to be exposed or discussed." Activity related to porn, gambling or hate speech automatically raises red flags, he says.
He once caught an employee who was engaged in criminal activity involving intellectual property that could have resulted in a big financial loss for the company.
Many years ago, I was in the company's server room talking to a buddy and he mentioned that an employee was taking up quite a bit of drive space - with porn. The guy had a problem. All you need is one guy with a problem like that to download some kiddie porn and your business will be shut down and you go to jail - over an employee with a problem. The guy I mentioned was talked to and I think he was asked to resign.
Observers say IT managers can expect to be asked to take on even more monitoring duties, such are reviewing video surveillance, examining text messages, tracking employee location by GPS or listening in on social media.
That's going too far. Come on - a Stalinist company?!?
Larger companies have started to hire third-party firms to monitor what's said about them in the blogosphere and on social media sites, but in many midsize and small companies, this duty could fall to IT.
That's also going too far. It's one thing what an employee does on company time and with company's resources, but they do on their own time - as long as it's legal shouldn't be a company's business.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
we pretend to work; they pretend to pay us
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
It comes with a worker's willingness to work for you. If he WANTS to actually work for you instead of just getting paid for spending time at your office, he will work. Else he will do a half assed job, surveillance or not.
If you give your employees freedom and the ability to actually enjoy working for you, they will be much more productive. Because they WANT to be productive. Because they WANT your company to be successful, because that means they can keep that job. Sure, you will always have the ones that slack off, and not putting an eye on them constantly sure gives them an easier way to do that. But their coworkers, the ones that actually want to work for you and do want your company to thrive because it means a good, enjoyable job for them, will quickly identify such slackers and they will do the surveillance for you. Peer pressure can be quite powerful, to the point where your slackers will quickly realize that it's not the boss but the other employees that get angry with him if he's not pulling his weight. Plus, you can do without the investment in cams and surveillance staff. Your workers will do that for you. For free.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If my employer blocked /. I'd be on Dice.com right now.
/. because it increases his awareness of emerging things in the IT field. I'm inclined to agree.
I have a friend whose employer actually encourages him to read
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
As a security professional in a VERY large company, you'd be amazed how many people go to porn sites on work computers. For some people, it seems like porn is like an addiction. They crave that "stimulation" so badly that they can't wait until they're somewhere else, or perhaps they don't have a computer at home, or perhaps the only computer at home is in a public area where other people can see what they're doing. There are many reasons why someone would chose to do something like that at work.
They also don't seem to believe the warning on the computer when they log in every morning telling them that we ARE monitoring their activities.
The problem is that new sites pop up all of the time, so trying to block them is like the old "whack a mole" game at the carnival.
I found one company-issued laptop with 16GB of porn videos, including kiddie porn. That was immediately turned over to the proper authorities and, if my information is correct, the former employee is now in prison.
Greetings and Salutations....
A few years ago, one my my clients asked me to generate lists of the websites their employees had been on, and, how long they had spent on the sites. Since I run an in-house DNS server, not that hard to get. Well, I ran the reports for a few months, then, the project was quietly dropped. Why? It turned out that the only folks that spent significant amounts of time on porn sites and other non-business sites were the President of the company (who had ordered the reports) and his wife, the CFO of the company.
And THEY were burning a LOT of time on non-business related entertainment and shopping!
What was really amusing to me about this was that these two folks had the attitude that they were the only ones doing anything positive for the company, and, the employees were the enemy - and were spending all their time trying to steal time and resources away from the company, cutting down on profit margin!
Regards
Dave Mundt
YAB - http://blog.beemandave.com/
You know, I'm SO sick of the total bullshit line of reasoning that people like you keep giving for gross violations of our privacy, not to mention keeping people like me from doing my job.
Okay, so your company has a policy of not allowing me to browse porn on the Internet, woohoo. Why is it that you jump to the conclusion that the only way to make sure this doesn't happen is to monitor every single web site that I browse? Why can't you just have a policy of, hey, if management has some reason to think that KingSkippus might be up to something, then look for something fishy?
Ponder this. I'm pretty sure that my company also wouldn't like me browsing porn magazines at work. They'd probably get quite irate if, in the middle of the day, I pulled a Hustler out and started flipping through those oh-so-sweet pages. So is the only answer now to have security guards posted at every door to pore through all of my possessions as I come and go, making sure that I have no porn in my physical possessions? I also carry a 4 GB USB drive everywhere I go with some basic troubleshooting tools and electronic copies of documents that I like to have on me at all times. Every time I enter the building, should I be strip searched and, when such a thing is found, every file inspected to make sure that I don't have dirty pictures on it?
No, the whole "We must monitor EVERYTHING!" is just a BS policy made because people like you get off on your power trip.
Legally, it's really simple. You create a policy that says that if you're caught browsing porn on the Internet, you get fired. Managers back it up with action by, when people are caught browsing porn, they fire the person who was doing it. There's no need for stupid ass content filters, treating everyone like they're 13 year olds, to ensure this policy, any more than there's a need for strip searches or searches of all physicial possessions. If a company gets sued--and make no mistake, they will get sued no matter what policy they have--they show the judge the policy and their record of upholding it, and that's that.
I defy you to actually cite these throngs of "all sorts of lawsuits from sexual harrassment to violation of ethics laws," especially the ones where the court found a company liable because they didn't have a content filter in place with people like you watching everything everyone is doing instead of enforcing the policy when violations were reasonably found Big Brother-style. As long as we're talking anecdotally, you know who I've heard does the most browsing of porn on the Internet? High-level management. True story: at the company where I work, most of the executives have been given explicit exemption from our content filters. As for the "ethics laws" joke, discover the wonderful world of "situational ethics" and then explain to how you're protecting a company that deliberately puts a clause that says, "From time to time, the firm may waive certain provisions of this Code" in its Code.
The truth of the matter is that my company spends WAY more on content filters and salaries for people to set them up and monitor them, not to mention the cost to the business when they break and the Internet becomes completely unavailable, than it would on bogus lawsuits that would have been brought anyway. The whole "you need content filtering to protect you" is a scam perpetrated by content filtering companies and people like you who would probably lose your job if management figured out the truth and actually cared. (And, more importantly, did their job of dealing with these issues instead of foisting them on the IT group.)
Back in the mid-90s, my boss read an article that explained about how login scripts could be used on Windows 3.11 to do things like delete Solitaire and Minesweeper and replace the desktop background with a forced company standard. The next thing I