Swivel chair surfers take note: The boss doesn’t have to literally look over your shoulder to find out how you spend time on-line.
And if you’ve gotten into the habit of using working hours to plan trips, track personal investments or check the weather report for Bora Bora, you may soon bump into the growing reality of the 1998 office: You can’t get there from here.
The free-wheeling days of wide open access to the Internet at work are coming to an end as software companies that built censoring programs for children extend their services to Corporate America.
Naperville-based Spyglass Inc. launched its business version of an Internet watchdog in May, joining a growing crop of products that enable employers to monitor everything from World Wide Web access to the content of an electronic message.
These Internet filtering programs have a ready audience. Businesses are looking for ways to better manage traffic through valuable Internet pipelines. Even more important, they want protection against rogue employees who use office resources to circulate pornography or violate copyright laws.
“Most businesses are getting fairly astute that there’s a problem out there,” said Michael Overly, special counsel in the information technology group at Foley & Lardner, a Milwaukee-based law firm. “They are doing a better job of letting employees know what the Internet can and can’t be used for.”
The Internet filtering companies are learning, too.
SurfWatch Software, a Spyglass division in Los Altos, Calif., developed a corporate version of its Internet filtering program after noting that about 20 percent of its sales were to business customers rather than families with children. The company estimates that the total market for filtering software is $17 million this year.
The professional version of its program can be customized to block out sites on the Web that not only may be inappropriate for viewing at work but could hamper productivity. Among the 21 categories included in the database are sites dedicated to shopping, motor vehicles, astrology, intimate apparel, general news, gambling, investing, travel and sports.
Checking a weather report or a stock price may seem like a brief and harmless detour to the average employee, but the traffic adds up. When SurfWatch evaluated Internet traffic for potential customers, it found that as much as 18 percent of employee activity on-line was not work-related.
But developing software that in essence takes the place of good judgment is no easy task.
SurfWatch employs a team of freelance content editors, including one in Monticello, Ill., who sift through millions of Web pages for pornographic, violent or racist material that may prove inappropriate in a corporate setting, and for the countless other pages that simply could provide a distraction. Their suggestions are passed along to SurfWatch staffers who make the final call on whether a site should be added to the list of blocked pages.
The company estimates that about 10,000 new Web pages come on-line every day, about 2 percent of which are inappropriate content for corporate settings. In all, there are about 100 million Web pages, by Spyglass’ count. Of that number, it has a database of about 100,000 that are blocked by its software.
Employers can then use the software to suit their own needs. Certain groups of employees can be granted wider access than others. Internet access can be turned on and off during certain time periods and the software can be used to monitor and report on access to sites by category.
SurfWatch and rival products such as the Learning Co.’s CyberPatrol–both of which start at about $1,000 for a typical licensing package–are taking off as more and more small- and medium-size companies invest in Internet connections for their employees. These businesses rely on software from third-party suppliers because they don’t have the technical expertise to design their own filtering tools.
Quorum Health Group in Brentwood, Tenn., which manages 346 hospitals, seven of them in Downstate Illinois, recently began using SurfWatch filtering software after spending a year formulating an Internet access policy. The company, which had revenues of $1.4 billion last year, opted to use blocking software to ensure employee activity on-line reflected the values of the organization, explained Paul Stamer, Quorum’s chief technology officer.
Designing an internal program to do the same chore would have been impossible, given the wide variety of demands at Quorum’s hospitals.
Though Quorum already invested a year in developing its policy and customizing its blocking options by department, it still considers the effort a work in progress. Employees are invited to call Stamer’s department if they need access to a blocked site.
Although filtering software may seem paternalistic, companies already routinely monitor and control employees electronic activities. About 35 percent of major U.S. companies keep tabs on workers by recording phone calls or voice mail, checking computer files and electronic mail or videotaping their work, according to a 1997 survey by the American Management Association. Nearly 15 percent store and review electronic mail and about 14 percent already review computer files.
Consultants and attorneys say that businesses have good reason to be both cautious and conservative.
When computer forensics companies dig for evidence of mischief on corporate networks, they rarely come up emptyhanded. More often than not, some employee has culled X-rated images off the Internet and stashed them for safekeeping on an office computer. Just as common is the hastily written e-mail that potentially gives away important competitive information, infringes on a copyright or libels a competitor.
“Pornography is very common. We’ve even found it in our own business here,” said John Jessen, who heads Seattle-based Electronic Evidence Discovery Inc., which provides information-age private detective services to clients nationwide. If there’s one truth about the Internet, corporate computer networks and e-mail, Jessen continued, it’s that they all “allow trade secrets to go out and pornography to come in.”
Experts say the problem is much larger than you might think. You don’t hear much about it because employee abuse of e-mail and the Internet are potentially embarrassing workplace issues that most companies are loath to admit in public.
A recent PC World magazine survey of top executives at 200 companies found that one in five has disciplined employees for improper Internet use.
Overly of Foley & Lardner, who specializes in Internet access policy, said that while few incidents are made public, he has seen a dramatic increase in reports from clients in the last two or three years.
There also have been several widely reported incidents of abuse that put many corporate attorneys on notice, Overly said. Among them was the recent firing of two employees caught using their office computers to share X-rated material at Salomon Smith Barney Inc.
Another high-profile incident involved charges of racial discrimination at Morgan Stanley Group. In this case a racist joke sent via e-mail was presented as evidence about attitudes in the workplace. The e-mail evidence was tossed out, and the suit has been dismissed, but it proved that electronic activity could potentially be used in cases involving discrimination or harassment, Overly said.
The Internet and e-mail haven’t changed human nature, they just offer employees more opportunities to exercise poor judgment and garner a larger audience while they’re doing it.
As the Internet has become more ubiquitous, companies are more vulnerable to charges of trade libel, harassment and copyright infringement. As of yet there is no legal precedent that a business could be held responsible for the poor taste or judgment of a single worker, but this category of law is so new that just such a case may not yet have had the chance to make its way through the court system, Overly said.
Even if the legal threat is difficult to prove, personal use of the Internet affects a company’s productivity.
Lurhq Corp., a computer systems consultant based in Loris, S.C., has seen a recent upsurge in requests for Internet filtering software. To date, about 10 of its customers are using SurfWatch.
But the key concern for Lurhq’s clientele is not porn but bandwidth. “If you have four employees on the Internet and one or two are using it for non-work-related reasons, they inhibit the flow of information for the others,” said Lurhq senior engineer Tony Prince.
But while abuses occur, some argue that the level of concern and investment is out of proportion to the problem.
“I personally think it’s related to volume,” said Adam Hartung, a principal at CSC Index, who heads the firm’s electronic commerce practice in Chicago.
As long as bandwidth is an issue, employers are going to wonder whether those employees tapping into the Internet are making the best use of the space they are consuming on the corporate network.
When the speed and quality of access isn’t impacted as much, those concerns will fade.
“We’re already seeing companies loosen up. They want to promote use of the Internet to boost productivity,” said Adam Hartung, a principal at CSC Index, who heads the firm’s electronic commerce practice in Chicago. “Even if you catch someone who went to a porno site, a company has to ask whether buying expensive software is worthwhile to catch a handful of employees.”
Hoffman Estates-based Sears, Roebuck and Co., for example, uses continual reinforcement to ensure that employees are aware of its policies. Its guidelines for Internet use pop up on employees’ computer screens every time they log onto the Internet.
The policy is part of a strategy Sears initiated in 1993, in which it streamlined its list of rules and regulations.
“The theory,” said Sears spokeswoman Paula S. Davis, “was the belief that more rules, ironically, create a lot of `what ifs’ and ultimately more questions.”
But while fostering a good work ethic may be the best solution in the long run, the mere fact that filtering software is gaining in popularity may change the legal landscape for corporations. If enough companies are buying blocking software, an employee who is offended by a coworker’s behavior on-line may argue that the company was negligent. It could have taken action to prevent the employee’s exposure to pornography, or other offending material, but didn’t.
Proving negligence, Overly said, turns on one simple question, “Did I do everything reasonable to prevent it from happening?”
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