djprocess wrote:
when a company moniter usage can they see each individual page you’ve looked on, on each site or just the actuall web address you’ve visted? ( if you know what i mean..)
They could do any, or all of these things.
It just depends on the software in use and how clued up your IT department are.
There certainly is software around to monitor forum posts, MSN chats and even private webmails. Some of it is built into certain kinds of networking hardware, and much of the monitoring/censorship technology is jointly developed by the Chinese (who want to censor for political reasons) and Western corporates (who want to censor for commercial reasons), despite all the claims by Western nations that they do not do this.
In many nations there is no guarantee of privacy at work using their resources and a big and growing market demand for this technology.
However, due to various complexities of local area networks and users operational procedures. In most cases the forensics gathered are not sufficient evidence even for an individual disciplinary case (as SL pointed out, others use the same computer and network gateway)
They can however be used to show an overall problem with misuse of the internet at work amongst a team of people using a group of computers.
The view of most trades unions and employees welfare organisations is a pragmatic one – if a company is that worried about staff seeing a certain website they should just block access to the site using effective software (rather than some of the half-measures used by some companies) and that puts a quick stop to the problem.
