At my place of work they just put in new restrictions as to what we are allowed to access on the internet. I can no longer use Facebook, YouTube, any streaming music sites(goodbye Pandora) and I am now restricted to viewing my official company email only-goodbye personal Yahoo and Google mailboxes. There’s probably a lot more, but I haven’t hit those particular walls yet.
So, how bad is it where you work?
I’m one of the owners. I can do whatever I want. (so can the employees)
No restrictions as long as it doesn’t interfere with your job. The last is unstated; you’d be told not to do it, but there would be no throttling of sites.
Same here. Our internet usage policy asks our staff to use the newspaper test: what would your family, friends, and neighbours think if they read about it in the paper?
Check your email? OK
Pay a bill? OK
Buy something on Amazon? OK
Surf porn? Not OK
Spend your work day reading the Straight Dope instead of doing real work? Not OK!
I just started a new job last month and have access to Gmail and Facebook, AND the SDMB again!
I could read the Dope at my last place, and if I typed a non-quoted message of maybe 20 or fewer characters it would go through, but otherwise I was blocked from posting during the day for at least a couple of years. YouTube used to be blocked, but they realized the instructional aspects of it and unblocked it.
Anyway, there is a filter at my new place and I’ve been blocked clicking on some referenced links here, but nothing like my last place of employment. Along with Gmail, and YouTube, and SDMB, I also was blocked from image sites like Flickr, Imgur, Photobucket, etc. Also ANYTHING to do with alcohol and tobacco.
And Instagram, and Pinterest, and Twitter…
This new place is like Disneyland.
Yep, same answer here.
As long as you get everything done, feel free to be on Facebook during your free time. Anything legal is cool (Porn ok, child porn not ok).
I can browse and post to the SDMB, read webcomics, and access most of the SFW web. Occasionally a thread here will ping the filters for gambling, weapons, games, or adult themes but it doesn’t affect me too much. Access to any personal email, social networks, or file-sharing sites such as Photobucket are all summarily blocked. I have access to YouTube as I occasionally need it for work purposes but most don’t.
It’s annoying not to be able to occasionally access my email but since they have installed office-wide free Wifi, I can bring my iPad in to do this on my lunchbreak if needed.
Our work PCs are all connected to the company network which are monitored for inappropriate use. But we also have a very robust (and unrestricted AFAIK) wi-fi set up for customers–most everyone brings a laptop or tablet to use on that.
DoD.
Nothing gambling or gaming related. Sports Illustrated is allowed, but their swimsuit site is not. Porn is blocked (I assume). Sports sites like ESPN or CBS Sports are allowed, but nothing Fantasy-sports related is. Humor sites like Cracked are blocked. Most political and activism sites are blocked.
Those are all of the major restrictions I’ve found. Everything else seems to be allowed.
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Free and open, but it’s apparently monitored.
The funny thing about my work now is that we work in medical aesthetics, so there are a lot of boobs and va-jay-jays that pop up on our screen. So if our internet were to block that, we’d be blocked from, like, 90% of our jobs.
This job nonwithstanding, the last 3 or 4 jobs I’ve had had zero internet restrictions (other than porn and stuff I’m assuming).
I work for a small company (the office itself is seven people) and there’s no internet policy or monitoring. Obviously common sense would prevail with questions like “Can I look at porn?”. I try to stay away from anything remotely sketchy as I have no desire to test our server’s virus/malware protection.
My previous job had no blocks on our usage although we were informally supposed to stay off during business hours. One time they pulled up logs showing one woman spent six hours a day browsing wedding-related sites and used that as cause to fire her but I never heard of anyone else getting in trouble.
My previous place of employment was the most restrictive I have ever encountered. Almost everything was blocked unless you could reach it from the company home page. You could request access on a site by site basis, but your case had to be very strong to be approved. Downloading of anything at all was verboten, as was adding any apps/programs from outside. If you needed a document from the web, a form, for example, the IT department would download it, print it out, and give you the hard copy only.
Quite frankly it was awful. I brought in my own laptop and tapped into the Xfinity hotspot nearby to get what I wanted/needed.
Internet access was completely forbidden where I worked. We had no official means to access the internet and if you tried to bring in your own equipment, you’d have been fired and probably arrested.
So I’d call it pretty restrictive.
Access to personal email (Yahoo!, gmail, etc.) was cut-off a couple years ago due to fear of phishing and viruses. I understood that there were several incidents of security breaches tracked to personal emails, so the restrictions were put in place. I can get to the SDMB, tho, and strangely, youtube, but there are restrictions on other standard stuff (facebook, Linkedin, Glassdoor) and you get a screen warning when you hit the wrong website.
I control the switches/routers/firewalls/dns servers and all sorts of other things. Also, I run the guest wireless system.
So I get whatever I want.
However, our most of our employees are locked down pretty tight. We run a set of DNS servers for the employees that are very limited, only allow certain job related sites.
There are some exceptions but only if you are director level or higher.
Slee
I’m a state contractor with access to sensitive customer data, so my web access is extremely limited. I don’t care about not having Google or Wikipedia or whatever, but it is annoying that I’m having to fight tooth and nail for access to HR and Benefits related company sites. Right now I’m waiting on at least three divisions within my company to talk to each other about whether I should be allowed into the site where I ask for FMLA leave for my son’s upcoming birth.
We have a employer (government agency) provided and monitored connection and also a separate connection from a commercial provider as backup. We are an emergency services agency and need to be able to flip from the primary signal to a backup if one signal goes down.
For several years we set one browser to point at the government signal and another to point at the commercial provider’s signal. The government signal restricts a lot of things we occasionally need on an urgent basis.
Recently the IT department has been forcing all signals to point to the government connection. And it is occasionally blocking important stuff. Need to review CPR training videos for recertification? - Blocked as streaming media. Need to look up details on overdose risks for a certain illegal drug? - Blocked as drugs are banned! and so on…
I’m sure it won’t be long before we’ll need out own laptops to do some of our work. Sigh.
Are folk who dream up these restrictive policies really as dumb as I think they are?
First the firewall costs money to implement.
Then the filter costs money to maintain.
Then the filters costs money when people waste time hitting their heads against it.
Then people waste time getting around it.
Then real problems arise because of the dangerous practices used to circumvent the filter.
Use a grown-up policy:
Get the work done.
The firewalls are needed anyway, and the filters are very little cost.
The hostile work environment lawsuits cost even more to defend, so adult-themed sites need to be blocked. Possibly violence and anarchy related sites as well (depending on management).
Malicious sites as well as warez/pirating sites are a liability to the company and may cause bigger issues (malware, ransomware, etc).
There’s no reason to support on-line games, so might as well block those while you’re at it.
Finally, when the Internet slows down and management asks why, you tell them 75% of the traffic is NetFlix and YouTube and other streaming media. By filtering those, you can cut your bandwidth costs in half. And while it’s not my responsibility to enforce, I suspect that Netflix and a majority of the other streaming media are detrimental to getting work done.
Well, I’m working in a Muslim country, so there’s a certain level of restriction based solely on that. However, things like YouTube, the various webmail providers, social media, etc. aren’t blocked on our work computers.