Is Your Company Monitoring Your Online Activity?

[Mental Gridlock]

Who puts these posts through while they sit in a cubicle chillin' doin' nothin all day or maybe super busy so you can fit in one post here and there or wherever there's a computer.

Is your IT/IS /Tec. watchin your messages when you post them? All the messages are property of the company right?

 

[Moonbear]

Since I work for a university, nobody cares what I post or don't post or when because there aren't any defined work hours and I use them as my ISP. Though, the best way to keep the IT guy/gal from sitting around reading what you're sending on email is to give them more work to do! I know our department's IT guy has way too much to do to sit around monitoring emails. Actually, the previous university I was at, where I did my post-doc, had a policy of NEVER backing up email servers. They did not want the responsibility of having to supply email records if they were subpoenaed simply because it could quickly become too time-consuming, so they gave us very little server space and everything we wanted saved, we had to store to our own hard drives and back up on our own. I guess that's what happens when the university president is a former law professor.

 

[hypatia]

I own my own business, so when its slow{like right now} I have time to post. Only one PC has internet access here and its linked to my PC at home, so no employee is alowed to use it.

 

[FredGarvin]

I do during lunch and really slow times. I really don't know if they monitor it or not. I figure that they see a lot worse thatn an engineer taking part in a physics forum. I'll let you know when my last day is. Honestly, I think there's so much data going in and coming out that, unless they have a particular thing to look for or reason to look at someone, they're not going to be able to sort through it all daily.

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

Currently work is the only place I have net access. While I'm at work I literally have nothing to do for the majority of the time I am here and so I play online.
As far as I know IT used to be able to look up what internet sites people have gone to if they really wanted to go through the work of looking it up and sifting through it all. Just recently though they put in place a program called WebSense that is supposed to monitor traffic. What they are telling us is that they hope to make sure that their bandwidth is being used in a productive manner by monitoring what sites people go to in general but not who specifically goes to what sites. Unfortunately while there are planty of people who work here that do have things they ought to be doing instead of checking out ebay I don't have anything better to be doing than playing on PF. Hopefully I won't be losing my net privledges.

 

[abhishek]

Sometimes I post from uni. Like now, when I have absolutely nothing to do. Not sure if they monitor this... there are hundreds (thousands?) of machines with internet access on the network, after all, so maybe they don't. Can't possibly be a problem with a physics student posting on PF from a compsci lab, anyway.

 

[Evo]

Part of what I sell to companies is network monitoring that will actually capture every keystroke every employee makes, it is labeled by employee name. They have one button to push, basically, and can pull up EVERYTHING an employee types, along with all IP addresses they have gone to. It's very cool stuff.

Most companies don't need to drill down to that level unless they are looking for ways to dismiss an employee. Usually they have filters in place that will pull keywords that they have selected to identify anything they want to see. It automatically sends anything with these keywords to them.

Your employer basically owns anything that goes over their network.

 

[Moonbear]

Usually they have filters in place that will pull keywords that they have selected to identify anything they want to see. It automatically sends anything with these keywords to them.

I ran into some folks that work at NSF and study stuff related to reproductive behavior. Apparently, they have some "filter" on their email that labels messages with chili peppers to indicate how much "dirty" content they include to help people filter their messages. They would compete to see how many chili peppers they could get sending totally legitimate, work-related messages back and forth.

The former IT guy in my department used to joke that our lab spent the most time viewing "porn." He didn't really monitor our usage, but joked that if he did, given the subject of our research, any keyword filter they used would be picking up our stuff like crazy (though a quick check of the history files on one computer told us that one post-doc was viewing porn and wasn't smart enough to clear the history. As long as he wasn't playing along in the lab, we didn't really care, though his general lack of productivity was a problem and he didn't last long around here anyway.)

 

[Evo]

I ran into some folks that work at NSF and study stuff related to reproductive behavior. Apparently, they have some "filter" on their email that labels messages with chili peppers to indicate how much "dirty" content they include to help people filter their messages. They would compete to see how many chili peppers they could get sending totally legitimate, work-related messages back and forth.

The former IT guy in my department used to joke that our lab spent the most time viewing "porn." He didn't really monitor our usage, but joked that if he did, given the subject of our research, any keyword filter they used would be picking up our stuff like crazy (though a quick check of the history files on one computer told us that one post-doc was viewing porn and wasn't smart enough to clear the history. As long as he wasn't playing along in the lab, we didn't really care, though his general lack of productivity was a problem and he didn't last long around here anyway.)

Most places are fairly lax, unless they are out to get you. You probably don't need to worry, a University isn't going to be as hardnosed as a public corporation. My advice to people is to use common sense, don't risk your job over something stupid, and don't use company e-mail for highly personal use.

Most of what the companies I sell to are looking for is the bandwidth use by employee, they don't want employees downloading large files, that's considered stealing and is grounds for dismissal.

 

[Kerrie]

i tell my boss that i am on PF-even when it's not lunch time we have had many discussions that all stemmed from topics from PF...when i am not posting/reading PF, i AM the IT person, the A/R person, Customer Service, file clerk, purchasing agent, quotation department, and sometimes ( ) the salesrep...in other words, i work extra hard, and he doesn't get on me about having a little recreational time on the computer.

 

[Mental Gridlock]

There's also a remote control that support can use to resolve computer issues where control of the computer is taken from across the country and the hijacked mouse cursor moves all by itself to click the fix it files. Of course this could be used for serveilance purposes so they can watch your moniter while you type the post (as long as they don't accidentally bump their mouse).

Part of what I sell to companies is network monitoring that will actually capture every keystroke every employee makes, it is labeled by employee name.

Oh no they're not just on your moniter, they're in your keyboards too!

 

[Evo]

Oh no they're not just on your moniter, they're in your keyboards too!

It's not actually in the keyboard, it's in what is being sent across the network, all of that can be captured.

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

There's also a remote control that support can use to resolve computer issues where control of the computer is taken from across the country and the hijacked mouse cursor moves all by itself to click the fix it files. Of course this could be used for serveilance purposes so they can watch your moniter while you type the post (as long as they don't accidentally bump their mouse).



Oh no they're not just on your moniter, they're in your keyboards too!

I've had that happen to me before! Lol... And I was complaining about them trying to take away our internet access at the time and how silly and unintelligent they had been in the attempt hahahahaha...

 

[Mental Gridlock]

It's not actually in the keyboard, it's in what is being sent across the network, all of that can be captured.

Well I didn't mean literally !

 

[Moonbear]

Most places are fairly lax, unless they are out to get you. You probably don't need to worry, a University isn't going to be as hardnosed as a public corporation. My advice to people is to use common sense, don't risk your job over something stupid, and don't use company e-mail for highly personal use.

My lawyer friend has had the joy of reading through lots of correspondence all saved from the emails of his client for the purpose of determining what is attorney-client privilege and what needs to be disclosed in litigation. Of course he can't tell me the contents of any of it, but he could tell me that it has provided some comedy relief from the boring document review process as they've come across jokes sent by email, and some, uh, more personal messages.

For the most part, universities don't care unless someone subpoenas records or claims abuse that they need to investigate, like spam. Otherwise, they're just not going to track 20,000 students plus another 5000 employees for what they're viewing on the internet or sending by email.