<snip>
>Since company time is an issue, you might want to consider blocking sports
>sites, chat rooms, games, and maybe even porn sites. People are human and
>it wouldn't be the first time an employee had a little fun on company time.
>Then, if you still want to track them set an invisible cookie that can't be
>disabled in the browser.
Blocking software tends to either miss things that should be blocked or
blocks the wrong things, so I'm trying to avoid that.
>I'm curious about English law and not trying to insult you or start a flame
>war. I'm in the US and am sure we have privacy groups that would complain
>loudly about tracking an employee's viewing habits unless it was porn.
>
>What is your countries policy on tracking employee web surfing?
>
I feel much the same way. The principle problem is money - it still costs a
great deal to connect an office to the internet during the day through
dialup. We really need to keep costs down and the Internet will only push
them up. If we had a permanent connection to the Internet, I would feel
worse about doing this, but I don't see any other way of going about it. I
agree with you in spirit about the privacy principle, but don't see how it
can be reconciled with the fact that employees shouldn't be using company
time for ANY personal browsing. A clear privacy policy will be drawn up.
There are other situations that would make me feel more uncomfortable:
1) Tracking employees, not telling (or reminding) them of this and using
this tracking to deduce private information, such as political affiliation,
sexual orientation...
2) Tracking of people online in a more general way. I'm worried about a
possible employer being able to buy information about my browsing habits
from the internet tracking firms, such as DoubleClick. I hasten to add that
I think that there are much worse people than DoubleClick out there,
possibly because DoubleClick are most in the public glare.
In short, I think that there is no enshrined right of privacy over here, but
I don't think that one exists in the US either. If anything, the European
Union is doing more to solve this, with privacy regulation that would cover
this and, more importantly, case (2) above.
tom
________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com
