> This is incorrect. We do not make spyware. That is not the purpose > and never has been. We make content management software. It can log > activity or not. The vast majority of our customers do not maintain > logs at all.
I'll trust you on that, and apologize for the roundhouse classification. Yet in your "several dozen cases where divorces were contemplated, employee terminations took place, even people who were sent back to prison" and "kids who have been grounded" examples, clearly your tool was used as spyware. And these are the cases which you brought under discussion. > Declude by design, is a TOOL. The user can make it behave any way > they want to. I do not agree. No matter how hard you try, you cannot make Declude alone distinguish between unsolicited porn and solicited porn. Yes, you can *not care* about which is which, but you cannot tell for sure. > Who said they had to be suspected spam? Who said? Dan said! His very concern is that held spam is being used to incriminate a user. Our question is how/why/whether Declude is being used as an agent in his dismissal. > We have received hundreds on inquiries about blocking adult material > whether it is spam or not. "Whether it is spam or not" is not a reasonable foundation for employee termination, which is, again, the topic under discussion--not the ways and means of blocking porn in general. > This is a hot segment of the market right now. A lot of spam is > tolerated. Porn is not. Porn pix, movies, and e-mail can each create grounds for sexual harrassment lawsuits, whether viewed/downloaded purposely or accidentally, so of course this market remains hot. Incoming porn e-mail does not itself constitute purpose. I believe the best medicine for avoiding both employee time-wasting and a hostile workplace is preventative technology, as CyberSitter or other content filtering tools provide, combined with people management, including both frank discussion of company policies and the creation of a stress-aware workplace in which people make human contact, take breaks, start new projects, whatever, instead of relying on their prurient interests to get them through the day. Suddenly dismissing an employee to deflect attention from your previous lack of filtering and person-to-person management skills is disingenuous; termination without warning may itself be questionable in court. > What they may be evidence of is violation of company policies. Information that "may or may not" be evidentiary...is not. > They may be unsolicited, may be not. Doesn't matter whether the guy > has a porn habit or not. If he is receiving inappropriate material, > and if the employer has good reason that some of it is not > unsolicited as you claim it all must be... An employee at will can be fired without cause, which is often the safe way out that employers take. But if an employer goes on the record as saying that a termination occured because of a violation of a company policy, this claim must be backed not with suspicion, but with legally valid evidence. In this case, like I said, if the employer's "good reason" comes from hard monitoring and red-handed evidence, then that evidence is all you need; incoming e-mail is essentially a red herring. > the employer is perfectly within his rights, and possibility even > obligated to fire the guy. The employer is only within his rights if his evidence is solid, and trapped spam is not solid. Fire away, and then get ready to settle the lawsuit. The question remains: are they actually going to cite porn spam, even a seeming "ton," as evidence in court, or have they followed this guy's tracks enough elsewhere to not worry about that easily challenged tactic? Hey, maybe this guy was really a baddie. We don't know. I do know that there are plenty of "protected" executives who surf porn all day and don't get canned, while people lower on the totem pole at the same companies can get warned for a single infraction. I've personally known an employee fired for being overweight (framed as a "productivity issue": lawsuit settled out of court) and one for not putting her hair in a ponytail (framed as insubordination, though without any company policy whatsoever: also settled out of court). After much wrangling, I convinced a client not to terminate the Internet access of an employee who demonstrated to me that an otherwise legit CAD/CAM tutorial site was supporting itself through soft-core popup ads (think auto mechanics' calendars). So I'm likely to keep my mind open to the employer's need to have a defensible case. -Sandy ------------------------------------ Sanford Whiteman, Chief Technologist Broadleaf Systems, a division of Cypress Integrated Systems, Inc. e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------ --- [This E-mail was scanned for viruses by Declude Virus (http://www.declude.com)] --- This E-mail came from the Declude.JunkMail mailing list. To unsubscribe, just send an E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], and type "unsubscribe Declude.JunkMail". The archives can be found at http://www.mail-archive.com.
