Is its reasonable for a boss to use key/ & site logging software to track internet usage by workers?
Per articles below, Already, 76% of companies monitor employees’ website connections, and 65% block access to specific sites, up from 40% in 2001. Some 52 percent scan e-mail, and around one in five keeps an eye on instant messaging. About 35% track the content, keystrokes and time spent at the keyboard, according to the 2005 study by the American Management Association and The ePolicy Institute, a Columbus, Ohio-based training and consulting firm. More than half of employers retain and review e-mail messages. Most monitoring is done at the network level, and most employers are under no legal obligation to tell you if you’re being monitored. In a study (PDF) by the Center for Business Ethics at Bentley College, more than 90 percent of companies allow “reasonable personal usage” of the Web, but only 42 percent define “reasonable.” For example, four out of five of businesses surveyed said it was okay for employees to visit news sites, but only about half allowed employees to shop or bank
Yes, the boss is paying for your productivity, and if there is a pattern of employees spending too much time on the internet and not getting their jobs done, it’s certainly reasonable of them to monitor net usage and take appropriate actions. Also, labor laws prohibit the display of certain things in the workplace (most notably pornography), and the company could get into serious trouble if it was discovered that they were letting employees browse porn sites during work hours and did nothing to stop the activity…in such a case, a class-action sexual harassment suit would only be the beginning of their troubles.
