Memo to U.S. workers: Your days of online shopping or other leisure
Web-surfing at your desks may be ending.
Across the country, thousands of large and small firms -- and government
agencies -- are installing special software that can block access to
individual Web sites from employees' computers. And while many companies
are only blocking the obvious suspects, such as sites featuring
pornography, gambling or hate speech, some firms are taking matters a
step further.
At financial powerhouse Merrill Lynch & Co., grumbling employees said
they are prevented from getting to online auctioneer eBay and other
e-commerce sites. Even widely used search engines are blocked for some
workers.
"They tell you they trust you with a million-dollar account, or with
someone's life savings, but you can't be trusted to look at the
Internet," said one Merrill worker. A company spokesman acknowledged
that Merrill uses the software but refused to provide further details.
As Internet use has mushroomed over the past few years, employers have
increased efforts to monitor how their employees use e-mail and the
Internet, concerned about everything from worker productivity to
employees inadvertently bogging down networks or leaving systems open to
viruses.
According to an FBI survey last year, 78 percent of companies found that
some of their employees had abused their Internet privileges, such as by
downloading pornography or pirated software. An Internet study by the
research firm IDC estimates that 30 to 40 percent of Internet surfing
between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. is not work related.
Read more
Reverend Chuck0 writes on Friday
March 07 2003 @ 08:54PM PST: [ reply
| parent ]
The anti-capitalist and anarchist movements need to put companies like
Websense into our sights in the next year. Workplace censorware direct
affects our ability to take our message to working people. Helping
workers circumvent filtering software isn't enough. We should consider
doing direct action against these companies.
We've damaged McDonalds' reputation and the capitalists are scared of us,
so what's a measly filtering company or two to the power of our
movements?
