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Not So Innocent
Ismael Rodriguez is a network analyst for Copier Country, a small New York company that sells photocopiers. A few years ago, after a salesman took the firm’s customer database when he left for a new job, Rodriguez installed a program called Spector Pro on most of the company’s computers. The software, made by SpectorSoft, can track and block the websites a user tries to visit and log his or her every keystroke. Rodriguez says that although he won’t examine anyone’s computer use unless his boss asks him to, most Copier Country staffers know much of their desktop activity is now open to potential scrutiny.
“I can see screen shots of what they do in Yahoo!,” he says. “I can see what they’re typing, whether it’s résumés or business-related stuff. The program even keeps track of songs that employees download to their iPod. There’s not anything these guys can get away with that I can’t see.”It’s a fact of life in the 21st-century workplace: The boss may well be watching, especially if you use a computer. A 2005 survey by the American Management Association and the ePolicy Institute found that about three out of four companies regularly track which websites their employees visit. More than half use surveillance software to scour office e-mail (looking for hot-button keywords like sex in the subject line or body of messages). More than a third extend their snooping to monitor how much time workers spend at the computer, record their keystrokes or log their downloads. And one in four companies reports firing someone for improper e-mail use.
As the use of monitoring software grows, more of the activity that many of us consider innocent is getting caught in the net. Who hasn’t opened his e-mail to find a message from a friend passing along something—a goofy YouTube clip, an off-color joke, a link to her brother’s new blog—that she’s sure everyone will find hilarious. If it does get a laugh, it’s probably passed along to a few more people.
No big deal, right? That’s surely what Heidi Arace and Norma Yetsko thought, until they lost their jobs at PNC Bank in New Jersey. Their idea of what was fun to share via office e-mail wasn’t amusing to their bosses, who found it offensive enough to fire the two longtime workers. Because the bank, like most companies today, has a formal policy against internal distribution of offensive material, Arace and Yetsko had no viable defense. (Bank officials declined to comment.)
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