Caught You Reading This at Work!

All right, let's see a show of hands. How many of you are reading this article while you are actually at work, supposed to be doing something else?
 
No, no really, put your hands down - this isn't school. Keeping your hands up too long may make your boss think that you are either doing some yoga exercise or you need more work to do.
 
"Please, please. I'd love to write more status reports."
 
Actually, I have nothing against you reading MalekTips at work (I want you to read MalekTips at work, at play, while on the beach...) I believe MalekTips offers computer users many tips and tricks that are relative to job-related activities.
 
It's all of those ... umm ... OTHER sites that I am talking about.
 
See, one of the things about computers is that they are great for masking a lack of productivity. To a boss it seems like the workers are busily tapping away, being completely productive. In actuality, the employees may be visiting sites that would make their mothers blush.
 
Realizing that workers may be going anywhere on the net, executives, managers, and other high in the corporate ladder folks came up with an idea. Why not monitor the websites that employees visit? That way, one could see at a glance whether or not employees were spending too much time on the web visiting 'wrong' sites.
 
This sounded like a great idea. Companies sprung up offering this service and executives sprung up with the cash to finance the installation of such hardware and software. This turned out to be a great idea except for one small problem. Actually, the problem was related to size, but it was not small. There are so many websites, and one can visit so many of them quickly, that it came to be impossible to track every single website every single worker visited.
 
Just imagine if it was your job, every day, to look through the website viewing logs of, say, 10,000 employees? Ouch.
 
So the tracking software got smarter. Lists of 'naughty' sites were compiled, and workers were either not allowed to visit those sites at all, or they were tracked when they entered such sites. Like a typical cat and mouse game, workers got smart - they started visiting obscure sites that they knew would not be on the naughty list.
 
Tracking software then got smarter and began red-flagging employees when they accessed any website too many times in a given period. So, if an employee visited http://www.thissitehassomereallybadpictures.com ten times during a day, a system administrator would be notified.
 
Continue ad infinitum...
 
My point of this article is simple: watch where you surf at work. Even though you may not realize it, you are using company property and company time. According to laws and court cases too numerous for me to mention (translation - I don't feel like looking them up), companies can and sometimes should track where employees are visiting and what they are doing. (Why should? To avoid sexual harassment lawsuits, for example). It is getting easier and easier for system and network administrators to set up such tracking mechanisms, so although you may not think you are tracked today, you may be in the future. Use your own judgement, but let this be a warning.
 
Article copyright 1999 Andrew Malek - All Rights Reserved. This article may not be redistributed without permission of Andrew Malek. All trademarks mentioned in this article are owned by their respective companies.

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