Watch it!

N. Nagaraj

YOU use e-mail to tell your manager that the report due tomorrow is ready now. You e-mail your colleague about some strategic plans to corner more marketshare. You e-mail your finance chief about some irregularities you found with payment schedules. You e-mail your wife some joke someone forwarded you. You e-mail your daughter at college asking her if she received the month's allowance. You e-mail a close friend the latest ``warm'' joke someone sent you. You send a ``bargains'' page to your cousin. All this during the course of the day, and from your PC at work.

Notice anything odd? No, nothing? Not that half the things you did were social and personal e-mail that you sent from work, using your employer's time, money and resources? If you think that that's all alright, the first thing you should do is try and check up on your company policies. According to a survey of 435 companies done by the ePolicy Institute in the US, 62 per cent of employers monitor their employees' e-mail and Internet usage. Of these, 87 per cent have a written e-mail policy; 83 per cent have an Internet policy; and 68 per cent have a software policy.

More than two-thirds of the respondents say that they monitor usage to handle legal claims and issues arising out of such use. Showing that legal issues are of major concern is the fact that more than a third of the companies surveyed have e-mail retention and deletion policies in place. And have they reason to be worried? A tenth of the companies have been ordered by courts to turn over employee e-mail related to workplace suits. Not only that, about eight per cent of the companies have had to handle sexual harassment/discrimination claims stemming from employee e-mail/Internet use.

Much more serious for the employee is the fact that more than half the respondents have disciplined or terminated employees for violating e-mail and Internet use policies.

The level of concern over e-mail and Internet usage shown by employers is put in perspective by the findings of a study by the Privacy Foundation. This study claims that 14 million employees in the US (about a third of the total US workforce) have their e-mail use and Internet access under continuous surveillance. The worldwide number of employees under e-mail and Internet use surveillance is estimated to be 27 million.

Low-cost surveillance

The study, while pointing out that employers justify monitoring with anything from productivity concerns to liability to claims for misbehaviour, also says that the major driver for increased surveillance is the low cost of surveillance technology. The study says that employee monitoring, as measured by the sales of surveillance software, has increased at double the rate of US office workers getting Internet access in the last few years.

The study also says that the worldwide sales of employee monitoring software is estimated to be $140 million a year, which works out to a little more than $5 per employee per year. Now, the question that has to be raised is whether it is worth it. However, given the litigious nature of individuals (and companies) in the West, it seems to be a small price to pay as insurance.

Another study, conducted by Quick Take for filtering software company SurfControl Inc, polled both IT managers and corporate Internet users about the use of filtering software within their companies. Forty two per cent of IT managers say that the use of monitoring and filtering software is standard operating procedure within their companies, and seventy per cent said they believed it should be so. The number one concern for which IT managers want to use surveillance technology to tackle is security (54 per cent), followed by productivity concerns (20 per cent) and corporate reputation (20 per cent).

Surprisingly, or perhaps not so surprisingly, 60 per cent of all corporate Internet users agreed that filtering should be incorporated into their Internet use policies.

Feedback can be sent to nagaraj@thehindu.co.in