I recently got access to the internet on my work computer (yippee!) – question is, what is the possiblity of getting busted for posting to message boards? I don’t go into chat rooms (they’re a bore anyway), but I read and posted to the SDMB and another message board yesterday. The managers at my agency have stressed several times recently that we’re not to use company equipment (fax machines, computers) for personal business, so I’m a little paranoid. Can the techies tell where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing on the internet?
It’s certainly possible, but it depends on what type of software the powers that be are using to enforce their policies. You’ll have to ask around to people you trust not to bust you to find out.
Yes, and very easily. They can just check
the address line above or your cookies.
Once I clicked into a ghastly site and
went nuts finding and erasing website
addresses.
I don’t know how much your employers know
about computers, but any technie could trace
it.
Briefly, yes. I don’t know anything about your company’s setup or policies, but it is possible for them to track where you wander dependant upon how they do things. Some can flag certain activities and be warned immediately, some can allow only certain access, and some can track and review at specific intervals. So, it could be a month later that you are asked about your www travels.
If they forbid it and you have other access (as you obviously do), I’d avoid spending much time with it.
A few weeks ago my employer hooked me up with unfettered access, and the SDMB is always less than a second away. But I avoid it during the day, as it is a huge time sink (check in at lunch). The only way they’ll catch me is by noticing a decline in my output, as we have no IT people in our office and our 4 networked Internet hookups are a stand alone system.
IMHO the only sensible answer is “don’t do it”. Just the fact that you have been told should be enough but do you really want to risk your job?
Or do what I did, find a message board that is company business and use it to bring good ideas back to the office and make everyone more productive. And if they don’t like it, send your resume to all the people on the board who’ve come to respect your professionalism and eagerness to seek and test ideas.
The software is out there to follow your every move keystroke by keystroke. Have you been issued a policy manual on this by your company?
its pretty easy to retrace your steps… You can do a couple of things… disable your cookies. Delete your history/temp folder/temporary internet files/cookies. This should help out. Then the company is mostly dependent on the type of tracing software they have installed. (Which I don’t know if they have to tell you about or not.)
Screeme
E-mail us when and if you get another job.
Sycorax,
Managers are indeed a complete pain in the arse. To combat the problem of cookie and cache files that incriminate you, download a program called “Cache and Cookie Washer” from http://www.webroot.com.
Run this program a few times per day and at least it will wipe away evidence from YOUR PC. It wouldnt change any info held on your server though. Still a cool tool.
busted at work? check this out…
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=26552
I wouldn’t bother downloading the diguises because the server records the information as well as the individual computer, which you probably don’t have access to. Besides, which is worse, looking at straigtdope or downloading software like that?
If you are on a LAN, sure they can find out in a second what you are doing.
The odds of getting busted is 50:50; either you will or you won’t. :D:D
I betcha this includes personal phone calls, yes? Honestly, how many people have never made a personal call from work after being told not to?
Of course, with internet access, they can keep a log of every site you visit.
What everyone else said. It simply depends on how badly they want to know. Not only is there software that will tell your employer every web site you’ve visited, whether or not you posted there and what, how long you stayed, and what you downloaded, there is also software that will tell your employer every keystroke you have made during the day, including every typo that you backspaced out in your latest Word document. The question is simply whether the nature of your job, or your employer, is such that they would want to go to the effort (whose full-time job would reviewing all those keystrokes be?) and expense to monitor you this closely.
We now have a written policy (formerly an unofficial one) that internet access and other tools are company property and are intended to be used primarily for business purposes. The “primarily” gives them to room to allow for reasonable, non-abusive use on non-company time, such as SD posting or personal e-mails at lunch or after hours. Obviously, the application of such guidelines is left entirely to the discretion of your particular boss. My own is cool and has no compulsion about monitoring my every move as long as the work is getting done. Another boss I work with occasionally had solitaire removed from all her department’s PC’s, not because anyone was goofing off with it (all monitors were visible to her at all times), but because she couldn’t stand the irritating sight of people playing games on their lunch hour. :rolleyes: My former boss (different department, same company) scrutinized the phone report on every employee each month and analyzed every number you called and how many minutes you were on the phone. She even called unfamiliar numbers to see if it was a personal call or not. (Now, there’s productive use of company time.) She had some obsession about the phone thing and would come up anytime she saw you on the phone and demand thunderously, “Is this a personal call?” Of course, she also monitored all her people at random throughtout the day, checking to see exactly what screen you were on in which application, and calling you to comment about it. Gee, I miss working for her.
Yes, my agency (local government) has a written policy about using company equipment for personal use, but they recognize that some limited use for personal business is reasonable. During a casual conversation with the assistant to the top manager, she commented that so-and-so does personal business on his computer; I mentioned that occasionally I’ll send an e-mail to my son, but that’s it (this was before I had inet access but could send e-mails). She said, oh no problem with that. I have disabled cookies, and limit history to one day, and clear it out every day, but I am on a LAN. I doubt if they have the manpower to check everyone so closely – they’re having a hard time getting and keeping techs cause we don’t pay enough – but I will be careful about which sites I visit. Didn’t post on the SDMB today at all, but I was tempted. 
I always assume it’s possible to be busted, so I don’t post from work (rather obvious from my post count), though I do frequent it more than I should. I try my darndest to restrict myself to news and finance sites (reasonable for my job), though do find myself running the scoreboards of major tournaments and will be listening to the BBC all day tomorrow and Friday.
I’m not overly worried about it, though. When your boss, the second highest person in the 1,100 employee organization, regularly has EBay pages showing on his monitor, I figure you’re pretty safe…
Yes they can find out pretty easily, but my personal thought is that if they would really fire you for that you probably don’t want to work there.
johnson - you say you don’t post but do frequent it more than you should – is there a difference between simply reading the SDMB and posting in terms of what the techies can detect? I’d be happy if I could read the boards and not necessarily post to them.
No clue–I’m not a techie–but I’m more careful about files I download and anything I submit than places I visit, on the theory that interaction is more likely to cause the system problems and therefore more likely to be scrutinized.
We’re lucky (in this respect only) in that we’re a government agency, pay sucks, and our tech people are overworked and underqualified. I think it’s very unlikely this will ever be an issue, though nothing is impossible.
As a friend from my last place of employ said, if you’re ever questioned (and especially disciplined), ask (or demand) to see the logs/records of everybody. You can be certain that almost everyone sneaks a peak at washingtonpost.com/EBay/ESPN.com (choose your poison) every now and again–if they aren’t prepared to discipline equally, their case against you is made more difficult. Not impossible, just more difficult.