How is internet use really monitored at companies with outsourced Tech service?

[NowhereMan]

just curious....

i work at a law firm and don't spend an inordinate amount of time online, but i keep personal email windows open a lot (don't IM or anything) and check a few message boards regularly....none of it's anything that would set off any redflags, but just wonder how likely it is that an employer would be aware of more time on one site or another....even regularly going to a site called "quarter life crisis" seems like it could cause some concern for an employer, no? does it set off more notice if you poast a lot as opposed to just reading?

my hunch is that no one really watches unless they have reason to believe you're doing nothing at work or your checking a lot of porn or really subversive sites or downloading a lot of music or something....i've seen people looking at Facebook and stuff like that. just curious from someone who may have worked in that field or been on the management side and seen how it really works.

[Screen Name]

I like this site but I would not surf it at work, not on the computer at least. I will look at jobs at work, no worries, just browse around, but this site on my workstation never. For me I really would never want to tip anyone off because I come here to vent, it also could be viewed as a sign of weakness. In the eyes of my employer I want to always remain as being confident. I would advise viewing this site on a mobile browser/cell phone if you have the desire during work. Email is fine, but the URL of this site alone, in my opinion, would send a red flag because it's descriptive and contains the word 'crisis'. I also think, depending how much you post details, it might be easy for someone that knows you to add the fact it was in your browsing history and then scan these forums and identify you based on your post content. They might not watch you now, but if they decide they want to get rid of you then they will start watching, whether or not a site is porn does not matter as much as if it's work related, if they want to get rid of you at some point and they see this site in your history logs they can easily site that as a reason along with the personal email.

[winneythepooh7]

I try to limit my personal internet use at work as much as possible. My theory is to never give them a reason to bring anything against you that makes you look like a slacker.

I also would absolutely never ever look for other jobs while at work. I know where I am, people have been called-out on that. Some people have even been dumb enough to print out job listings from their computer and then forget to pick them up out of the printer.:rolleyes:

[Tayl405]

My BF is our IT guy. It works out fantastically :D

[NowhereMan]

well, tay - how does he say it works? i work at what would be considered a small law firm, but there's still like 60 employees....when i log on it says there are "40 clients" but it seems like there's more people than that with computers. maybe not. we have a guy well call when we have problems with the network, but we don't have an in house IT guy....part of me thinks they don't really monitor it at all, but i still don't abuse it.

just curious how it really works....i agree it's best to err on the side of caution.

[wordsmith]

The only place I've ever worked where it was monitored was a law firm.

I've also never worked anywhere where tech stuff wasn't done in-house.

[NowhereMan]

was it a big law firm or a boutique? how do you know it was monitored? what were they looking for?

i'm just curious - like i worked for a law firm where everyone open played fantasy football during the fall and even somewhat allowed office pools for stuff like the NCAA basketball tournament, and then i've worked at a place where that would not be allowed....law firms are pretty different beasts.

[wordsmith]

It was the large regional branch of a Legal Aid (pro bono, poverty) law firm, i.e. partially governmentally funded, and always being audited for security and client confidentiality. Fairly large firm, by Legal Aid standards, the central office for one half of the state.

The managing attorney for the biggest unit, one of my supervisors, both created and administered our system, and he did the monitoring. They were looking mainly for anything that compromised any confidentiality or security in any way, and time wastage. We were required to log our time in five minute increments.

[NowhereMan]

did they tell people if they were checking email too much, or did it just kind of regulate itself? we definitely don't have anyone who looks at that stuff full time, and i can't imagine an independent contractor with other accounts would have the time or interest to check everyone's shit unless he was specifically told to do so by management. i've never been reprimanded about 'net usage before and when i worked at the state from 2001-2004 i jacked around on the internet all day, and didn't care at all. we had someone in-house then but i never heard anything.

i'm just curious from anyone who works in tech services or know someone who does to sort of enlighten me as to the process?

[NowhereMan]

I was hoping for a little more specific insight especially since some people on here work in IT.

didn't mean for it to be focused on law firms....just sort of asking how personal email/internet is filtered generally - if it has more to do with the amount of time you spend online, or words that you submit....like if reading a message board, but not posting wouldn't show up as much?

i mean i keep an internet browser open almost all day at work (at many different jobs) - i usually have it to NYtimes or whatever, but just go back to email or anything else when i need a break. never had anyone talk to me about internet use, but just don't really know how it works.

[wordsmith]

I was hoping for a little more specific insight especially since some people on here work in IT.

didn't mean for it to be focused on law firms....just sort of asking how personal email/internet is filtered generally - if it has more to do with the amount of time you spend online, or words that you submit....like if reading a message board, but not posting wouldn't show up as much?

It would generally have been frowned up on for a messageboard to show up at all. There was really supposed to be no personal internet use, and no use of personal e-mail (we could be fired for e-mailing anything related to clients via a yahoo or gmail account or similar...client information was only allowed to be transmitted in very specific ways for reasons of confidentiality). Sites that weren't specifically related to our work would be noticed over time.

When I worked in journalism, there were really no restrictions or monitoring, because we used to many different resources validly for work-related purposes. It was also a much more relaxed atmosphere. Nothing was ever monitored, and nobody was ever talked to.

[NowhereMan]

When I worked in journalism, there were really no restrictions or monitoring, because we used to many different resources validly for work-related purposes. It was also a much more relaxed atmosphere. Nothing was ever monitored, and nobody was ever talked to.

i use the internet everyday for work -- all sorts of different stuff. but again i'm just asking generally how it works. sounds like at this one particular place where you were they screened everyone's usage....i've never seen anything like that personally, but sometimes i just wonder how it works at the average company.

[wordsmith]

i use the internet everyday for work -- all sorts of different stuff. but again i'm just asking generally how it works. sounds like at this one particular place where you were they screened everyone's usage....i've never seen anything like that personally, but sometimes i just wonder how it works at the average company.

Yes, they screened everyone's usage (I'm sure at random, not consistently, but the consequences were such that you really didn't wanna lose that gamble). I've never worked at another place that operated that way, or even close to it, but it was essentially because of client confidentiality and the fact that there was not insignificant governmental funding that would have been yanked had there been a breach issue. I didn't particularly enjoy working at a place that did operate that way, but more for other reasons than their 'net policy. Anyway, in my personal experience at various workplaces, most aren't so hawkish.

[Tayl405]

They tried to implement something like that here awhile back. Certain sites were banned and if you went to them, a message would pop up saying that IT had been notified. Generally, they wouldn't do anything about it unless it went on and on. They had some system of banning any site that was porn or gaming. Message boards and shopping weren't banned (phew!).

[NowhereMan]

They tried to implement something like that here awhile back. Certain sites were banned and if you went to them, a message would pop up saying that IT had been notified. Generally, they wouldn't do anything about it unless it went on and on. They had some system of banning any site that was porn or gaming. Message boards and shopping weren't banned (phew!).

at my last job i noticed sometimes when i'd refresh my Yahoo! mail i'd get a message saying that something had been blocked by the internet security software -- i don't think IT was notified. the funny thing was though, is that it must have just been a pop up ad or something, because usually the mail was fine. sometimes i'd end up on blogs in a google search and some were blocked and others weren't....always made me wonder if they were just screening for certain words in the URL or if in the site was causing them to be filtered.

i guess this stuff always works differently at different companies, but i'm about to start a new gig and just wondering if there's a way to tell how closely you're being watched.

[wordsmith]

When I'm new someplace, I tend to play it safe and steer clear of nonessential internet use, and once I've been there long enough to get to know the lay of the land and coworkers, take my cues from others. If other people are using personal internet all the time, and I don't hear otherwise/read otherwise in policy, it's probably okay to make reasonable personal use. Generally, in more lenient workplaces where no solid policies exist, I've found that nobody cares much about stuff like that until work is getting neglected.

[steph78]

My company (which is a very small engineering consulting firm) stated when I was hired that I was welcome to use my work computer for personal e-mail/web browsing, but it was to be on my own time, not company time. Employees were kind of on their honor not to abuse this, and it generally works out, people don't abuse it because they have projects they need to get done on deadline and if you waste your whole day on the internet then you have to stay late to finish your real work! Now that I work from home on my own computer I guess the policy still works the same way for me.

My husband's company is pretty hardcore about it since a lot of his work is government contract for NASA or Dept. of Defense. They block whole categories of websites. He can't look at any online photo album like Picasa/flickr, etc. and I know there are a ton of other things that are banned as well. Ironically he has to do a lot of online research for his job and he is always submitting requests to IT for them to override the blocks and let him look at certain sites to gather information needed to get his work done. But CNN.com is not blocked and I have a feeling he has that open all day because he is WAY more up on his current events than I am!!

[ebrillblaiddes]

BF worked on the IT side of a phone company for a while. IM was fine (they even used it internally) and in general they could go to pretty much any site they wanted to (other than obvious NSFW stuff), among other things because they might need to diagnose a problem that someone was having with it. However, if they were obviously posting to somewhere, that site might get blocked.

I'm in education so obviously there are more filters on things because the kiddies might sneak onto the computer. On principle a fair amount of stuff is allowed, such as reading and posting on teacher-oriented message boards, and looking for lesson plan ideas, however filters are not always that smart. Sites that contained educational games might be blocked for containing games, for example.

[callyna81]

I've only worked in one organisation where it was REALLY monitored (like, to the point where we couldn't send external WORK email, everything had to be vetted by a supervisor first). But I was actually kinda okay with that (although it had its impracticalities coupled with the fact we weren't allowed ANY phone access on site), because they were VERY upfront with it. Everywhere else I've worked has generally had some kind of rule, ie, limited personal access. Three of my employers had access to most things, and another one allowed general access but blocked off the majors - YouTube, Facebook, MySpace (at the time), etc. I generally have found that if someone's usage is THAT BAD, it's either

a) physically evident
b) complained about by other peers

[old_school_soul]

I've worked in IT for quite a while.

As some people have pointed out, there's a difference between active & passive monitoring of internet use.

Lots of things can be passively/retroactively monitored (company emails, web sites).

One key thing to look for is if your browser is using a proxy server. That's a dead give away that they are at least passively monitoring/logging your use. Whether they do anything with it, is up to them. Generally that sort of data is logged and stored for X amount of time to use as evidence in case legal matters arise.

Chat's are more difficult to monitor, unless they are going through a proxy as well. If you're worried, I'd highly recommend using a chat client that encrypts the messages regardless of what network you're on. This is different than just encrypting the protocol (HTTP vs HTTPS). By encrypting the text itself, even if it is logged somewhere, it's going to just look like gobbledygook. Check out http://pidgin.im/ and the OTR encryption feature to see what I'm talking about

Some other places will do quarterly reports of users based on the proxy server logs, seeing who is going to what sites and for how long.

I generally would not recommend going to any site that is questionable from your work computer unless you know techniques on how to hide your traffic ( ssh tunneling with your own personal proxy, vpn, etc). Even then, they could still possibly see that you are attempting to hide something, but wouldn't know what you were doing.

The other way to monitor people's usage I've seen:

Scripts that daily pull the web history from the company workstations, keystroke logging, software that takes secret screen captures of what you are doing every 5 minutes, and others.

[NowhereMan]

I've worked in IT for quite a while.

One key thing to look for is if your browser is using a proxy server.



how can you tell?