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Recently in Salon Technology

I e-shopped till I dropped
Playing Santa's little helper, I surfed for a digital camera -- and longed for an elf to take a load off my aching eyes.
By Morgan Sande
[12/07/99]

Technology: View from the top
Prime time online
Jim Moloshok just launched the multimillion-dollar Entertaindom portal. Can he create the successor to network TV?
By Susan Kuchinskas
[12/06/99]

Column
See spot run
Internet firms throwing big money at TV ad campaigns are making an elementary goof.
By Scott Rosenberg
[12/03/99]

Singing the MP3 blues
Indie musicians find online music distributors every bit as greedy as the recording industry they aim to replace.
By Emily Vander Veer
[12/02/99]

Sex sells, doesn't it?
Tales of financial chaos at the heart of an online porn empire.
By Mark Gimein
[12/01/99]

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Of course, anyone with an e-mail address knows it's next to impossible to keep your in-box free of dirty jokes and sexually explicit JPEGs. If my in-box is any judge, even in this era of sexual harassment suits, a lot of professional people have no qualms about forwarding a little X-rated fun on to friends and colleagues.

Civilian and military employees of the Navy are apparently no different. A Navy investigation begun in May revealed that 500 people at a Mechanicsburg, Pa., supply depot had traded sexually explicit cartoons and photos or sexually suggestive jokes and stories; nine were suspended from work and letters of reprimand or admonishment were sent to several hundred others. "This poses a threat not only to the overall sexual harassment-free climate, but to the public trust reposed in us all to use government resources wisely," read a July memo to base employees.

Ostensibly, employers monitor employee's computer activities to avoid sexual harassment lawsuits and improve productivity. Yet, if these are the only reasons management is interested in employees' electronic activities, why wouldn't they inform workers of their surveillance policies? Wouldn't employees be less likely to engage in "inappropriate" behavior if they knew they were being watched?

"I don't think anyone would deny sexual harassment lawsuits are a significant problem for employers," says Jeremy Gruber, legal director for the ACLU's Workplace Rights Project. But, he adds, the threat of such suits doesn't justify wholesale monitoring of all employee communications.

"Simply because an employee is on a pornography site doesn't mean a company is automatically liable," he says, dashing a common theme of corporate mythology. An employer would be liable only if he or she knew (or should have known) that an employee was feeling harassed because of another employee's surfing habits, he says, and that he or she did not take proper action against the employee who was visiting the offensive site. Similarly, an employer would have to be informed that an employee was sending sexually explicit e-mail to someone who did not want to receive it for the company to be liable. "Employers have used the threat of sexual harassment lawsuits as a justification for generalized, random monitoring ... and this random monitoring without cause is an overreaction and an invasion of employee privacy."

Nielsen wouldn't discuss exactly what transpired at the Times, but at least one person who claims to be among those fired says there was nothing unusual going on. "I personally never downloaded porn," writes "landrol," in an online discussion on the Virginia Pilot site. "I may have received it in my e-mail, unsolicited, but never once did I seek out and download it ... I think there are more effective ways to deal with this sort of incident. The company went way overboard."

"It sickens me to hear the media portraying it as some sort of porno ring when it wasn't," he continues. "You can't tell me that other organizations don't circulate jokes within their e-mails."

Nielsen had little to say about "landrol's" defense. "We don't discuss internal employment decisions but the matter was thoroughly investigated and the decision was well-founded," she says. The Times sent out a company-wide memo announcing the terminations and reminded employees that it "does not routinely monitor the e-mail communications of employees ... [but] we do investigate when a violation of the company's e-mail policy is reported."

Boeing and Xerox are among the companies that do routinely monitor employees. In October, the Xerox Corporation reported that it had terminated 40 people for engaging in online activities that violated company policies. Most engaged in "excessive abuse of the Internet by spending a majority of their work days visiting inappropriate sites" such as pornography and gambling sites, says spokeswoman Christa Carone. That behavior, she adds, resulted in productivity losses for the company.

"Xerox is able to review a lengthy log of all the Internet sites viewed by Xerox users as well as amount of time on each site," she said, describing the monitoring system the company uses. "From this log, we have identified several sites to monitor. From there, we can track down excessive abuse."

The ACLU's Gruber says such surveillance has increased over the past 10 years in large part because the cost of doing it has plummeted. Monitoring software is readily available and easy to implement. "If you have properly trained managers and supervisors, they should notice if an employee's productivity has dropped dramatically or is not up to a certain level, at which point it would be entirely justifiable for an employer to monitor him or her," says Gruber. "Random monitoring without cause, on the other hand, is a gross invasion of privacy."

Boeing, however, argues that a company can use surveillance and still create a healthy work environment. Employees "are allowed to use company-owned equipment for personal reasons during non-working hours, like before and after work or during lunch," says spokesman Bob Jorgensen, but they are warned that certain sites, including those that advocate terrorism, racial or cultural hatred or pornography -- should never be accessed, whether during work hours or not. "A company policy requires new hires to be informed of our Web monitoring," says Jorgensen, and all company computers issue a warning upon start-up to further remind workers that their computer use might be reviewed without their permission or notice.

Managers are reminded that people could land on a taboo site a few times without meaning to -- by clicking through the results of a search engine query, for instance. And workers are given verbal warnings and suspensions before being fired for repeated offenses. "Less than a dozen people [of 203,000 employees] have been fired to date because they continued to return to inappropriate sites," says Jorgensen.

But monitoring employee activities -- with or without due warning -- is invasive and unnecessary, say privacy advocates. "Upon entering the workplace, one does not lose one's rights as a citizen," says EPIC's Shen. "Just as one expects communications to remain private at home, so they should in the workplace -- especially considering how much of the monitoring takes place without any cause or suspicion."

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