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| Pornography: Not for the workplace. (Part 1 of 2) |
| Computerworld Canada - March 27, 1998. Unlike the old saying, for many businesses today, ignorance is not bliss. As a consultant in Internet filtering and accessibility, I would like to say that most of my clients are proactive, but that's not usually the case. About a month ago I got a call from a major ISP (Internet Service Provider) which delivers service to large corporate clients. The sales manager said that one of their clients had a serious problem. It appeared that one of the client's employees had been caught viewing child pornography on their PC. I immediately arranged to come in and begin some investigations. Although the employee had been terminated the company still had to assess the nature and seriousness of the material at hand. I spent the better part of a day combing through the employee's hard drive, network files, floppy disks, and CD ROMS. What I did not find was child pornography or any signs of illegal material. What I did find was disturbing none the less. The employee had amassed almost three hundred carefully organized Internet pornography bookmarks. Many of them were "Teen Sights" which display young women that are barely of legal age. You must understand that merely the maintenance of some three hundred personal bookmarks represents an exorbitant amount of wasted company time, irrespective of the legal, moral and other issues. Upon further examination, I determined that the employee clearly knew that he might be caught and had erased any files off of the computer before anyone could search through it. Much like piecing together a police investigation, there were some clear tell-tale signs of a serial pornographer on his computer, including the most popular plug-ins and other applications for viewing streamed and interactive pornography. There are many perplexing issues around viewing pornography in the workplace. Perhaps most obvious is why someone would risk their job and even their livelihood to view such material at work? One reason is that most of the leading edge pornography requires more bandwidth than most other web sites, and corporate networks provide this high speed infrastructure, many times without restriction. Many frequenters of pornography may also be too embarrassed to view such material at home with a family around. Few people get caught viewing the pornography because most of the time the viewer is extremely careful about the times they view it and the positioning of their display monitors. During the time I was examining the employee's computer, a number of his co-workers mentioned that they were aware of his behavior and his distasteful hobby. Why didn't anybody say anything? Many co-workers may never report any such incidents because they know that the employee has a wife and children to support and that reporting the incident may lead to their dismissal. It was only a younger new employee that reported this incident, and so she should have. Internet access in the office is a double edged sword. On the one hand employees are able to do competitive product and industry research, upgrade software, order products, check courier weigh bills, and hundreds of other useful work related tasks. On the other hand, they can view their own stock portfolio, look up old friends, check lottery and sports scores, keep current with Olympic results and yes, even download pornography. There are many issues within organizations around providing unlimited Internet access to employees during the work day including:
The second part of this article will focus on preventing pornography or other non-work related Internet content in the workplace. |