You’d think so, but I keep reading stories about employees who have been busted for just that. Most of them are government employees but I suspect a reporting bias here; annoyed private employers would simply can the guy.
I’m retired now, but was working in a bank and, since we dealt with financial information, it was pretty restrictive. No personal e-mail accounts, no social networking sites, no file exchange or photo posting sites. They were leery of malware being slipped in or someone being phished into sending something out. I could read the articles on the SD site but not the MB (“social networking”). Anything to do with gambling was also out but alcohol was okay. Probably tobacco too, but I never looked.
Due to bandwidth considerations we were asked not to stream media. We could shop, but, again, were asked not to on Cyber Monday.
Let’s just say that I can’t load about 1 SDMB page in 20, probably because you people are such sex-crazed potty-mouths. Or link to stuff that gives Websense conniptions. Or, sometimes, the ad broker is serving up malware again.
Oh, as for that. When my printer was down for some time I would forward e-mails from home if I wanted to have a hard copy for some reason. There was something called Ironport that would sometimes intercept it if there was a dodgy word (bitch in an AKC dog show entry for example) and ask if I really wanted to see it. One time I was sent as Trainer in Training a notice about a conference call (I wanted the phone number handy) and that got quarantined. “What could there be objectionable in a two-sentence e-mail?” I wondered as I released it. “Oh. TiT.”
Ironport was replaced by something that gave you no option to release anything, just notice that it had been blocked. I was annoyed.
I’m a contractor working for a state. A few years ago they moved us from one department, which had reasonable restrictions, to another. This new department has a moron in charge of IT restrictions, because they make no sense at all. You get NO STREAMING, BAD! hand-slaps on a lot of stuff, but can bring up YouTube, Amazon Video, and even Netflix no-problem. So, I can’t listen to Spotify, but can listen to full albums and playlists on YouTube? I can’t stream news videos on site X, but can watch bad action movies on Netflix? Every once in a while they try blocking random new things, but usually roll them back. They tried blocking “Sports” once. Sports. That lasted three days.
I don’t understand the point of restricting so much stuff. Are they expecting people to go, “Well, I can’t surf the sites I want, so I’ll just be super productive at work instead.”? Do they think people aren’t going to find workarounds or just browse on their phones instead?
