2004-05-16

Stonehouse, David. Behind the scenes. The Age Online - Icon. May 15, 2004..

Interesting quotes: "There is no doubt privacy at work is vaporising. A US study looking at the monitoring practices of nearly 200 companies found that 26 per cent of managers monitored employees' online activities all the time, not just when something gave them a reason to investigate. At the same time, a quarter of the organisations surveyed by Bentley College's Centre for Business Ethics have no procedures or safeguards to ensure the snooping isn't abused, and almost half of the firms lack written guidelines, policies or procedures for monitoring. Personal use of the internet at work is dubbed cyberbludging or cyberslacking and is widespread. Instead of chatting over the water cooler, workers are swapping emails or instant messages. Instead of going shopping on their lunch hour, employees stay at their desks and hit their high-speed connections. According to a survey done by the online career site Vault, seven in 10 workers use the office internet to hit news sites and one in four use it for shopping. A third fancy financial trading at their desks, 13 per cent download music and 4 per cent surf for porn. A third admit to an hour or more a day of personal surfing and another three in 10 confess that their web adventures and personal emails decrease their productivity on the job. More than half say they have been caught. Cyberbludging can hurt the corporate bottom line. The online monitoring company SurfControl estimated in 2000 that non-work-related internet use costs Australian businesses $300 million a year. "