I worked for one of the three largest banks in the US. Our email was set up to flag anything that had an attachment with resume in its name, resume in the text of the email, or any use of the word position.
I know this because I was a VP and got the reports on my entire unit. I also found out a buddy had sent over 72 emails that hit the target in a 6 week span (we were struggling through a scandal).
The company said this was a way to limit attrition, and in all honesty, I never saw anyone terminated over this. I did, however, see promotions denied & bonus distributions slashed.
By the by, most big companies log the sites you visit to the central file server. Even after you blow out your history files and cache, I know if my staff visited Monster or Career builder.com almost in real time.
Many organizations block the site referenced above. Also, unless you log into the internet directly, you are most likely routed through a server that the organization owns, logs, and backs up.
True, but that site was just an example; there are many sites out there that provide this service and more crop up every day. Depending on the filtering software and the configuration, this may or may not be a huge problem. If, for example, you’re filtering software uses an “exclusion” based access list (listing sites to be blocked, as opposed to sites that are allowed) then it’s pretty easy to temporarily get through until someone wises up. This is because I can set up a secure anonymizer in about 5 minutes on a remote server with cgi enabled, and it won’t be in the access list because it didn’t exist 5 minutes ago. This sort of activity is hard to combat, because it requires human monitoring of web activity, and that’s expensive. Some places do it, many don’t.
As for the organization keeping track of your usage, this is almost always true for people using a proxy server, but keeping your anonymized traffic encrypted over SSL will keep people from knowing where you were going. They may be able to see you spent all day at the anonymizer, but they won’t be able to tell where you were going from there without cracking open your workstation directly (which they might be doing anyway). SSL is not casually breakable; in fact, it’s nearly impossible to do for your average IT department.