Employers crack down on web-surfing at work
Elaine O'Connor
CanWest News Service
Wednesday, May 28, 2003
OTTAWA -- A roster of office spies with code names SpyAgent, Shadow, Silent Watch and Sentinel have infiltrated the workplace. They aim to sniff out corporate cyberslackers, and they won't have trouble finding them -- Canadian employees are surfing the web at work in droves.
A recent Ipsos-Reid poll found Canadians spend an average of 4.5 hours a week online at work for personal reasons. That's 1.6 billion hours a year. Although the majority of Internet use is legitimate, the jump in personal use -- double that of 2000 -- has caused a surge in computer surveillance.
Paying employees to bid on EBay, shop online, play games, trade stocks or instant-message friends isn't usually a corporate priority.
"Companies are getting tougher," says Anthony Whitehead, chief technology officer at Ottawa's Bajai Inc., an Internet-monitoring software company. Just three years ago, for example, only 33 per cent of Canadian companies had Internet-use policies. Now, nearly 57 per cent have.
During an audit of one Ottawa-area firm, Bajai uncovered 640,000 hits to adult sites in May 2001 alone: This, at a workplace with an Internet-use policy and fewer than 5,000 workers.
"It makes some jaws drop. A lot of people would like to believe this isn't happening," he said.
Not surprising then, that enforcement is on the rise. In 1997, 35 per cent of American companies monitored employee online activity; by 2001, nearly 80 per cent had started web tracking, according to an American Management Association study.
Employees who take personal Internet time at work feel surveillance erodes trust and morale. But firms counter if only a few workers are misusing the Net, abuse can damage a firm's reputation and bottom line.
Corporations can be held liable if workers download illegal material such as child porn, if they violate copyright, or harass a co-worker via e-mail. In the U.S., for example, Morgan Stanley was sued for $70 million US after racist jokes were circulated on its e-mail system.
THEY CAN TRACE VIRTUALLY ANYTHING
What can employers trace? Essentially anything they want. The range and depth of computer surveillance software is unnerving, if not Orwellian.
There are basic programs that log all activity on company servers, blocking access to websites, stopping explicit e-mails from being sent, freezing downloads of video or audio files, and spitting out reports exposing where each employee's computer has been. Then there is software that tracks how long employees are using the web, taking screen shots of the pages they visit and saving transcripts of instant-message conversations.
Some programs watch the frequency of e-mails, others such as FastTracker, let employees watch a scroll of their co-workers' online activities.
TELLING NUMBERS
15: Hours per week spent online by Canadians at work.
4.5: Hours spent online for personal reasons.
88: Percentage of those with Internet access at work who admit to using it for personal reasons.
30: Percentage of time spent online for personal reasons.
57: Percentage of Canadians with access at work who say that their workplace has a policy regarding personal Internet use.
67: Percentage who feel that employers are within their rights to monitor employee's e-mails and Internet usage.
71: Percentage of Internet time spent online at work that is business-related (10.8 hours). Extrapolated over a 40-hour workweek, 27 per cent of the typical workweek is being spent using the Internet for business purposes, an increase from 16 per cent in 2000.
88: Percentage of those who use the Internet at work who send work-related e-mails. This is the highest category for work-related use.
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Percentage of people who have Internet access at work and have done this activity:
70: Personal e-mails.
63: Checking news and sports headlines.
50: Comparison shopping for offline purchases.
41: Online banking.
27: Online purchasing.
26: Checking investments.
9: Porn sites.
Source: Ipsos-Reid
-- OTTAWA CITIZEN
posted May 28, 2003 11:59
posted May 28, 2003 17:39
