I know someone who was given an official warning over the amount of time she spent messing around online. I also know someone who was given a warning for visiting a porn site because they considered a lesbian messageboard porn. Both were about 10 years ago.
Yeah, I don’t get that bit either.
Sites like Facebook were blocked for a time because people were apparently doing that instead of working. Then we got new computers and never bothered to install filters. I know emails are monitored because I’ve gotten responses from my boss to emails I sent to other people (the third party who monitors them forwarded them to him) saying I should have done x instead of what I said in the email. Silly stuff, but I wasn’t “in trouble.”
I am an information security guy by profession.
It depends on the company, how much they want to spend, etc. Sometimes, as others have noted upthread, an employee (say, “Bob”) is not getting work done, or someone sees him goofing off, or whatever, and he gets reported to management. Management then goes to IT for more detail on what Bob is up to.
Other places do routine checks, though. In one place I worked, I got the web filter logs every week and looked at the top people who were blocked for one reason or another, then did a closer look at their activity. If Bob is getting blocked a couple hundred times in a row for trying to get to porn sites or whatever, there is a reason he keeps trying (e.g., he’s getting to something he wants). In those cases, I would report Bob to his manager and it would be up to the manager to decide what to do about it.
So, yes, I know lots of people who got in trouble for web surfing.
Email is slightly different. In most cases IT doesn’t poke into someone’s email unless there is some suspicion of misuse, harassment, data leakage, etc. But more and more companies are now going to Data Loss Prevention products that monitor emails and flag on keywords or other criteria. In those caes, someone needs to review the alerts from the DLP system and take action. If the DLP tool sees Bob’s email address sending out a list of a few hundred Social Security Numbers or something, the person receiving the DLP alerts will need to initiate a response.
Yes, I have seen lots of people get in trouble for this too.
I was called into my manager’s office and accused of writing a particular post on a message board (TripAdvisor). Apparently the word came down directly from the Minister of Tourism, who happened to be the Premier. Doesn’t get much more serious. I was informed that an investigation would be carried out and I could be disciplined or even fired. There wasn’t even an allegation specifically that the post was made on company time or using department computers or internet connection.
I do write on several of message boards related to tourism for my island. Lots of comments on many different things, some of them political in nature. But the only thing I have ever written for TripAdvisor is one positive review of a hotel in an entirely different country. No way I wrote what I was accused of that set off this investigation and I’ve not heard any more of it.
Some years back, I worked in a high security position. Except for our time cards, we were not to surf the net except for specific research. One guy who got into trouble (I don’t recall if he was fired or not) claimed he was researching types of glue when he googled “bondage.” :rolleyes: Now that I think of it, if they didn’t fire him, they should have - he proved himself to be too stupid to be allowed access to classified material.
A couple of people at my workplace just got a warning for their Internet usage, but it was streaming video sites and showed up as high bandwidth usage.
The chief executive of Bank of Ireland, one of the biggest Irish banks, was basically fired over inappropriate web usage.
He was looking up escort sites, if someone is wondering.
I was in Afghanistan in early 2003. My only employee at the time was an Afghan who spoke pretty good English. I was going to a meeting and he asked if he could check his email at my computer while I was gone. I got to the street, realized I had forgot my phone and came back in to the office to find him jerking off to porn at my desk. Since I didn’t know another person in the country at that time, I wrote him up for misuse of company computer, but didn’t fire him.
You still have an email written 14 years ago?
It was 12 years ago, but I was fired for - supposedly - surfing inappropriate, mostly porn, sites all day long. I was arm-twisted into taking two months’s salary and leaving quietly.
Now… I was the department supervisor and our workstations formed a ring with 4-foot walls between them.
My desk was at the far side of the ring and my monitor was visible to anyone who walked by (a location I hate; I like to be able to look up and talk to people passing by, not have to turn around).
The aisle passing the entry of the ring was a major traffic corridor.
In other words, most of the company could see me and my screen at any time of the workday, and I had no way to tell if anyone was watching.
I had a much more powerful internet system at home.
In the words of Al Bester, PsiCop, “On a scale of 1 to 10… just how *stupid *do you think I am?”
But goodness me, there was the IP tracking log, all two inches thick of it, showing almost nonstop porn-o-rama’ing from my workstation, all day, every day.
Oh, did I mention that the IT manager hated my very shadow because I dared to question some of the ways he had my group set up?
Oh, did I mention that this one was one of the companies where the local UC grads worked, still wearing their alum sweatshirts, and put in 10-hour days because they lived two blocks away and had nothing else to do, while I was a family man who lived 30 miles away and put in (hard) 8 hour days?
First and last time I was ever railroaded like that. I went to work for a company down the street, having told them the absolute truth of the matter (as above)… and the IT manager dropped a case of PC parts and a screwdriver on my desk the first day and said, “You build it. I’m busy.”
Yeah, I have coworkers who do this too, and who don’t understand the difference (and they work in IT!).
But the line has blurred in recent years because Google Chrome (and various mobile browsers) only give you a single box to type into, and will use it as URL or search term based on some undisclosed rules. I find this appalling.
I work for one of the largest companies in the world. Until about 5 years ago, there was very little internet filtering. In the years 2002 through 2006 there were two people I worked with that were fired for viewing porn. In the case I was most familiar with, the guy was a peer of mine on a small team. No one caught him, no one suspected him, and there were no performance related concerns. Our manager just got a call one day from an IT security group and HR and told him that this guy was going to be fired. Then they forwarded the manager a bunch of documentation showing what had been looked at and when. I talked to a guy who worked in that group once, and I don’t remember what kind of technology they used to track, but they evidently had a bunch of “flagged” sites, and got reports on who was accessing them. If you just hit the sites once or twice, they didn’t do anything, assuming it could have been a mistake. But if, like this guy, you hit them a couple of dozen times, you would get the axe, with no warning.
Then, about 5 years ago, the filtering got very tight. Currently, most social media, political, blog, and many other sites are filtered. It is a pain if you are trying to google a technical question. I don’t know that this filtering means they no longer do as much monitoring.
So, short answer, there are some companies who do monitor employees’ internet usage, and take action on it.
My wife worked for a place that blocked one of the forums she would visit. She wasn’t warned or anything, she just lost access to it (and it was a unique enough place that it’s unlikely anyone besides her ever went).
At my old workplace, the few people I know got in trouble because of something like a manager using their computer to go to Google and a bunch of non-work related history searches popping up. One girl got busted for always being on World of Warcraft sites. I’m guessing it was one of those “always catch a glimpse of her screen until you get suspicious” type things. They actually gave her an ultimatum to stop browsing non-work sites and she chose to quit rather than give up WoW forums :dubious:
I got a warning for something similar - I had a web proxy set up, and directed a bunch of traffic through it (email, web browsing etc). At the time I was underutilised, so I spent my time on the MS Training system. Unfortunately, all the traffic was routing through my web proxy, so there was a constant stream of compressed web traffic to my work PC - I got picked up on an audit, found it hard to explain to an administrative flunky, and told to knock it off. I did, and was fine.
Back in the late 90’s, however, I had to attend a callout to a customer site. They had just fired their systems admin (who was a very good systems admin) for inappropriate internet use. He had almost accumulated a whole CD worth of pornographic images on his cd (prior to burning it to disk, I guess). His PC had been identified from the proxy logs, and an operation organised that involved an alert from the proxy manager, to the HR manager, who confirmed the admin at his desk. I was the schmuck who had to setup an Exchange server and start restoring his mailbox from tape, then reviewing the emails he sent. It was a tedious, slow task back then, and wasn’t helped by my finding the evidence that the admin has also misused the company digital camera, sending inappropriate personal images via email to what appeared to be a co-worker of his wife (maybe his wife had a different surname at her workplace, I wasn’t trying to find out that). Not enough eyeball bleach in the world, I tell you. Fortunately, they decided that the cost of my time was more expensive than discovering more indiscretions - they had all they needed. Of course, we also had to change every high-access password in the building (a 1GW capable power station) and secure every remote access point. It was a busy few days.
Eventually, they employed a very nice gent to write a new internet use policy. Unfortunately, that gent had a predilection for looking up images of copraphagia and scat porn, and was soon on his way after being busted one saturday afternoon for violating the policy he was trying to write. I was glad to not be part of the review of that particular incident.
I’ve heard of people who have gotten in trouble for viewing fairly innocuous message boards, but which allow avatars / animated gifs.
As these are often linked from dodgy sites, from an IT perspective it is as if you were yourself navigating direct to biggifsofbigtits.com, when all you’re really doing is reading about the football.
Maybe some of the knowledgeable IT folk could comment on whether this sort of thing is credible - it’s never happened to anyone I’ve directly worked with myself and as said, web-use is often just a smoke-screen to bin someone for whatever reason.
A security guard at the publishing house in Egypt I worked for was fired for late-night porn excursions on MY computer. I noticed that my browser history was…exotic…and told management. They looked at the security video tapes, saw who was doing it, and canned him.
Since it wasn’t through IT department monitoring that he was caught, I don’t know if that counts according to the OP.
The financial director in a place I worked was sacked and arrested and convicted and sent to prison for the child porn he had on his office pc. It was part of a big police investigation, though, nothing to do with the internal IT people.
But things sharpened up considerably on the IT front not long after that, unsurprisingly.
A knew a lawyer kicked out of the firm and fired for looking at porn all day.
Yes, a colleague was sacked for looking at porn sites.
Damn, porn addiction is real thing, ain’t it? Makes me wonder how many folks in my organization are jacking off to bigfatasses.com right now.