Employee monitoring has evolved to allow varying degrees of spying

Scott Brown, vice-president of IT at Atlas Hotels, a California chain of three hotels, once counted how many hours his staff spent online shopping in the weeks leading up to Christmas.

With software he'd bought, he determined his 1,500 staff had spent 6,000 hours on a variety of sites, buying gifts for loved ones instead of providing room service. So the following Christmas, Mr. Brown engaged the software's filtering program, with a goal of preventing e-shopping in the Christmas season.

"I turned (shopping) off at midnight on (U.S.) Thanksgiving, and didn't turn it on again till the 26th of December," he told the OBJ. At an average pay of $18 an hour, a large amount of money was saved on Atlas's bottom line, he said.

"You can see there's a huge difference in payroll."

Monitoring what employees do online is increasingly common, if not routine. A 2005 study by the American Management Association of some 500 companies in the U.S. showed that a quarter had fired staff for inappropriate web surfing and e-mail use.

For Adam Schran, CEO of Internet optimization software maker Ascentive LLC, the reason employers need to pay attention where workers are going online is to keep communications pipelines flowing.

"The biggest thing that we've seen is, it bogs down the infrastructure," he said, listing sites like YouTube and BitTorrent as major contributors.

"We've had companies who buy our software, and very quickly, their bandwidth usage has plummeted," he continued. "Previously, they had massive amounts of YouTube usage. With our application, they didn't have that anymore."

Reasons for surveillance vary, ranging from a desire to increase productivity, to the need to protect company data and hardware from viruses and hackers, and also to lessen potential liability and litigation.

In the last three years surveillance has only increased, despite individual cases like one settled recently in Alberta, where a judge deemed a keystroke recorder added to just one employee's computer was an invasion of privacy rights.

Monitoring versus filtering

Some security programs work by filtering websites that are too risky, risque, or just plain bandwidth-hungry. Websense, in the filtering business since 1993, is a veritable pioneer in that sector. Willy Leichter, the company's director of product marketing, said filtering has evolved in the last 15 years.

"For many years, it was sort of an arms race as to see who can make the biggest list of (taboo URLs)," he said. "That's still a part of it, and we still believe we still have the biggest list."

However, with new URLs created each minute only to disappear after only a few hours, more "on-the-fly analysis" is required by Websense along with a quick blocking response time.

Ascentive, on the other hand, said filters create too many false positives and negatives. Their two-year-old product, called BeAware, takes periodic snapshots of an employee's computer screen throughout the day. Rather than blocking sites outright, it works on the premise that the boss will view the user's viewed files later.

"(Companies) will invest in filtering software that will block people from going to certain websites," said Mr. Schran. "But then they'll come and get our software too, because the employees will feel totally disrespected and mismanaged when they're blocked from going to certain sites." He gave an example of salespeople being blocked from their clients' sites, "because somehow they got on the blocklist, even though they weren't shady or pornogrpahic."

Big brother's flexibility

For employers, it's a balancing act. Managers want to ensure security and productivity, but what about privacy and respect?

Both Ascentive and Websense are U.S.-based companies, and boast international sales, including within Canada. The companies both acknowledged countries like Canada sometimes emphasize privacy rights at work, or may wish to provide more freedom in the workplace. Their software allows users to fiddle with settings on their respective tools, allowing for increased flexibility in certain areas, and decreased flexibility in others.

"There are obviously privacy concerns," said Mr. Leichter. "A lot of the appeal of our product is in giving the appropriate levels of control, privacy, and delegated administration."

Pornography, hate sites and hacking sites are, naturally, blocked. But with grey areas, he said, his filtering allows certain sites to be accessible at certain times. "Shopping's OK during lunch hour, but not during the rest of the day," for example, he continued. "YouTube's fine, but not six hours a day. Let's limit it to two hours."

Ascentive's Mr. Schran has also put the control entirely in the workplace's manager for their monitoring software.

"If you have a team of professionals you don't want to go into a code-red lockdown, and not let them do any personal stuff on the Net," he said. "You just want to prevent people from abusing it to the tune of four hours plus a day."

One feature, called "private time," allows employees to turn off monitoring software.

"Managers can set a certain amount of time every day that people can actually turn off the monitoring, so they can go e-mail their kid, or if they don't want their boss knowing – say they have a medical ailment – they don't want that monitored."

Whatever the case, it appears employees adjust, eventually.

"Initially, when I first engaged the filter, there were complaints," said the hotel's Mr. Brown, particularly since social networking sites like MySpace were affected.

"But now, I think they enjoy it."

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FACT BOX

Do workers know they're being watched?

According to 2005 survey of 526 U.S. firms, of those that engaged in employee monitoring:

Source: American Management Association