Absolutely it’s a problem. We’ve not had a problem since we moved to all open-plan offices, though.
This is short-sighted: bandwidth is expensive and non-work use negatively impacts the ability of other employees to do their jobs.
Related comic relief
Only if you get caught.
I’m the network security officer at out State government department. In the past a previous Exeutive director had a zero tolerance policy on recreational surfing. A couple of people were fired as a result. The rest of the department got the message and thre was a quiet period. During that time, the proxy server that did all the nannying ‘fell over’. We had no active monitoring.
18-24 months later, I replaced it with a newer, better product, but we just had it in monitor mode. 99% of the employees were well behaved. The remaining abusers already had reprimands in their records and were handled as necessary. We then changed the policies to reiterate that certain sites were not permitted…but then used the proxy server to block most of those sites. That effectively changed the climate from ‘we’re trying to catch and screw you’ (so to speak) to: If you can’t get there, you can’t get in trouble.
Right now, the most popular sites are streaming audio. Since it’s less than 10% of our traffic, and we’ve got plenty of provided bandwidth, it’s something we allow.
So, we don’t want to fire you for surfing porn, and we try to prevent the temptation, and most likely, the folks that would do so, are caught doing something else.
No, while bandwidth costs some money, it is in fact cheap, much cheaper than it used to be. Maybe pron movie file bandwidth can be costly. Pics and stories … not so much.
I’m actually lucky that we’re allowed to surf almost unrestricted. If the policy was no non-work surfing, I’d certainly obey it. I still quite can’t understand why people go to porn sites at work if they’re in an open space. I might understand a night watchman with no one in the builidng, but an average cubicle dweller.
Anyway, I’m glad our IT people don’t hassle people for an occasional wrong click. They’re smart enough to realize that a 5 second click on a link was probably an error.
Sure, porn can be entertaining. If you just treat it as an irritant to stimulate you and then enjoy the relief when that irritating stimulus is gone, I see your problem. Not everyone responds like that. Low-level porn like … naked women dancing … can just be a mild, pleasurable stimulus that, while not necessarily boner inducing, produces a pleasant frame of mind. That is, while you labor in the bowels of the Dept. of Redundancy Dept., it’s nice to know that somewhere, naked women are dancing. Kinda like snowflakes.
So your bosses decided they should treat everybody like porn addicts because one employee browsed porn, and restricted all internet use at work. Well, historically, bosses have had all sorts of rationales for treating people like shit, but they never seem to treat themselves like shit. My feeling is, woe to you if you buy into their rationales. Who knows what rationale they’ll come up with next?
Not my boss, my mom’s. I don’t know if this mandate was passed down to all state employees by the Dept. of Administrative Services, or if it is strictly the Dept. of Revenue. But it doesn’t surprise me they’d react that way. I used to work for the state myself, and they were always on about the evils of wasting taxpayers’ money by goofing off, wasting resources, etc. Combined with the way identity theft is the next biggest boogeyman after terrorists these days, and it doesn’t surprise me they freaked out over an employee wasting taxpayers’ money on porn and exposing those same taxpayers to potential identity theft at the same time, and responded in such a draconian manner. I don’t defend it, I’m just glad I’m retired and free to goof off on the web all I want. 
Oddly enough, exactly the oppsite happened to me.
I worked for an organization that was involved in children’s issues. Another organization sent us some e-mail concerning the rights of gays and Lesbians to adopt children and serve as foster parents.
The e-mails were blocked by the spam filter.
Our boss got righteously indignant that e-mails about important issues were being filtered, so she ordered the IT to unblock references to gays, Lesbians, incest and a few other key words.
I’ve been waiting for years to use this in the proper context…
You know what it’s going to be, but wait for it anyway…
Penis ensued.
My first ever proper job in 1995 was in an office where one of the graphics guys had a perl script that ran overnight to download and decode some of the alt.pictures newsgroups. He’d spend the first 45 mins or so of his day sorting the resulting pics into his particular filing system (nudity, lesbian, dp, etc etc). The resulting 4-5 gig of porn was accessible over the network, all you had to do was ask him for the path and a password. Everyone knew, no-one cared. This was in a computer company in the City of London, so was a very blokey environment indeed. Nowadays, I don’t think that would ever be allowable, since it cant make women feel particularly comfortable when half the men in the office are looking at hardcore porn during their lunchbreak and dull conference calls.
Everyone I know who has worked desktop support has come across porn on PCs now and again. Not usually a problem, just chuckles to share with the rest of the techies, until they stumble across something brain-bleachingly weird or horrifically illegal - again, people shouldn’t have to deal with that sort of shit from their colleagues.
Once at work, we had a guy who used to download porn and then photoshop the heads of other female coworkers onto the images… and for some reason, he didn’t think that those people might not be too keen on his hobby!
For some, I wonder if the chance of being caught adds to the excitement, or whatever.
I know personally of two men at my company who were dismissed for this. (I wonder if the statistics skew towards men in this regard?)
One was just about to retire and was surfing gay porn where it was clearly visible by about 99% of the mostly female staff. Bet he had fun ‘splainin’ to his wife why he was out of a job.
VCNJ~