Comments on: Internet and email use: Know thy policies and what they mean

By: cassie bell

cassie bell — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 16:29:26 +0000

I’ve actually read a news article where technology became the case winning piece of evidence. True story — a young man was accused of robbery, but after his Facebook status allegedly claimed that he was fighting with his girlfriend at the time, it was impossible for prosecutors to put him at the scene of the crime. His defense lawyers then subpoenaed Facebook to release documents proving that his Facebook status was indeed changed on the young man’s account using his computer at home. After the father verified the claim, all charges were dropped and the man was set free.

I guess technology doesn’t have to be the villain all the time.

By: Sharon

Sharon — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 04:25:59 +0000

I think the question in everyone’s mind is how long the employee had to visit 27,000 sites. If it ended up being as long as 27,000 days (as impossible as that may seem), that would simply be a visit per day (which I bet a lot of employees do anyway). Time makes the weight of the accusation relative.

It would be beyond ridiculous if that important information was the one fact excluded from the report.

By: Betty F

Betty F — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 04:18:37 +0000

I can’t believe that the employee not only slacked off during office hours, but got paid a big fat paycheck in the process. There’s no excuse for that kind of behavior, but then again, I think the article points out a real good lesson.

The IT department literally dropped the ball in that court case, and probably without any supervision from management, failed to give any articulation to the report they had given the court.

By: Terry Erickson

Terry Erickson — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 14:40:24 +0000

You can not leave a pile of data for someone to interpret in their own way. Especially when they are not technically savvy.
While the employee was obviously browsing non work related sites, the timestamps would have been an important piece of the puzzle I believe.

It is also common for one page view to actually contain multiple views, depending on how laden it is with advertising etc (which look to outside domains). Some mailicious sites will cause a chain reaction of loading pages that climb in excess of 50 views if proper protection and blocking is not in place.

All of these can be used in the employer of the employee’s benefit in this case, depending on who is pointing to which column of data.

Thus it is critical to have protection in place, and provide good interpretation of data. Imagine giving your monthly stats to management as a big pile of spreadsheets. Who knows what they could read from that (other than they need someone in your role that can sort things better).

By: Kay T

Kay T — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 19:20:11 +0000

It’s not fair for a company to be paying an employee who is doing something not related to his work, and excessively at that. This is why I think it’s ok to use activity monitors like auto screen captures on employees’ machines to log what they are doing on normal working hours. Some people think it’s invasion of privacy but i think any company has the right to do whatever their employees are doing on normal working hours.

By: Sue Walsh

Sue Walsh — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 03:54:21 +0000

27,000 visits? Wow! Over what span of time I wonder? SSE was clearly in the right-it’s too bad their disciplinary officer’s cluelessness cost them the case and a good chunk of change!

By: Iam Huey

Iam Huey — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 17:22:13 +0000

Wow. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. There’s one lucky employee. I wonder how much of that 27,000 visits was on Facebook. LOL