Web at work: Not YourSpace

Suzanne Choney • E-mail

It’s March Madness, and a good chunk of the Web browsers on office computers are set to CBS Sports, where the NCAA playoffs are being streamed live.

Maybe your boss is letting you watch some of the games for a few minutes of the day. Or, maybe your company has decided to block the site from you.

Maybe, as global outplacement consultants Challenger, Gray & Christmas suggest, the “annual distraction could cost employers as much as $1.7 billion in wasted work time over the 16 business days of the tournament,” some of it coming from watching the games on work computers.

But it’s not just Web entertainment at work during March and early April that’s a problem. It’s the other 10 months of the year, as well.

Lots of companies monitor the Web sites their employees visit while they’re using work computers; most workers realize that.

More companies, however, are moving to track the minutes spent and keystrokes made by employees while they’re on the Web.

In 2001, when the American Management Association and ePolicy Institute did a first survey on workplace electronic monitoring, 19 percent of employers “told us they were monitoring time logged on and keystrokes,” said Nancy Flynn, ePolicy Institute executive director.

In 2005, it was 36 percent. In the 2007 survey, released last month, “that number had grown to 45 percent,” she said.

Some of the increase may have to do with the economy, and a demand for increased productivity by companies that now have fewer employees to handle the same or larger workload.

The past few years also brought a surge in the popularity of bandwidth-heavy sites such as YouTube, MySpace and Facebook.

The sites, with their large video and audio files, not only strain companies’ computer networks, they involve more than a quick mouse click or momentary distraction from work.

Security and legal liability are also huge issues.

“The organizations that are concerned about the amount of employee time spent (on the Web) and actual content of keystrokes, their concerns revolve around not only productivity, but security,” said Flynn.

“They’re concerned that the Internet sites their employees are viewing, or the images that they’re downloading, uploading, printing or e-mailing, are going to trigger lawsuits. That’s the No. 1 concern.”

At the end of 2006, Flynn said, the federal court system amended rules of federal civil procedure so that “all electronically stored information is subject to discovery in litigation."

If a company is the target of a lawsuit by an employee, all electronic records stored by the company, including what Web sites employees have visited, "can be subpoenaed and used as evidence to support or damage the company's case," she said.

The federal rule “really made clear to all employers that all online activity creates essentially the electronic equivalent of DNA evidence," she said. "You need to keep your online employees in line.”

Monitoring that eBay time
Larry Ponemon, a nationally known privacy and data protection consultant, says companies are using a number of tools designed for security to also monitor employees’ Web activity.

“We all expect monitoring from companies making sure that you’re not doing awful things, such as going to illegal Web sites, or saying awful things in e-mail messages or instant messaging,” he said.

“We’re starting to see more companies using the same technology that was initially designed for security to determine things like, are you on a Web site that is not work-related?”

Such technology includes “keystroke-type logging, to video of what your screen looks like,” to see if there are certain patterns of Web surfing, he said.

“They might use some sort of crawling or sniffing technology on a network to see whether you’re at a Web site that is known to be a site for slackers — for example eBay — places where people spend a lot of time, places that take too much time in the workplace.”

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