Full Text: Open Debate

Barry: The problem for me is that to find violations of acceptable use, one has to monitor non-violations. To find out if an employee is using the telephone to call her bookie, you have to listen in on her conversation with her physician. To discover if an employee is shopping online, you have to monitor his online reading. Enlightened employers refrain from intrusion into their employees’ private affairs, even those affairs that involve communication using firm resources, unless and until there is some grounds for concrete suspicion of bad behavior. Routine monitoring of all communications, no matter how well intentioned, is from a moral perspective an invasion of privacy (even though employment law in the U.S. allows it). And by the way, I realized full well that the provocative line I quoted about your product came from an article in a trade publication. But it is disingenuous to say “this is not something the company touts as a feature” since the company chooses to present that article, including its headline about Big Brother, on its own web site under “Solutions.”

Sfakiyanudis: I disagree. Not all forms of monitoring are nefarious as your comments imply. To know that an employee is shopping while at work, one only needs to know that they are visiting an online retailer. Our systems don’t report on the content of employee communications. Our systems document sites visited and the amount of time spent there in addition to the amount of bandwidth used. Even “enlightened” employers would welcome the ability to quantify their suspicions and to have documentation for any necessary action. It may be against your “moral perspective” to monitor use of a corporate asset, but case law dictates that employers take responsibility for the actions of their employees while on the corporate network. Would you have an employer turn a blind eye to an employee surfing pornography for 7 hours of their work day? How would that affect the morale of the their coworkers carrying the full workload while waiting for the employer to develop some “concrete suspicion of bad behavior?” As to the article on our website, it is a positive product review by a well respected trade publication. The term “Big Brother” is used very liberally these days to describe any technology that monitors any activity, including websites visited.