privacy

[willg at bluesock.org (will)]

My experience is that large companies (talking multiple sites with 
hundreds if not thousands of employees) tend to see Internet usage as a 
waste of employee time and employ fascist measures to reduce Internet 
usage.  There may be members of the company that are comfortable with the 
Internet--and even see the Internet as a very useful resource for speeding 
up work, but the company generally frowns on such things.  The Internet is 
scary to these people.

On the flip side, I think this is mostly relegated to large companies and 
companies with a significant portion of older manager folks who haven't 
gotten their hands around the Internet yet.

All the contracting gigs I've done so far have looked the other way in
terms of Internet/network usage.  One company only complained after one of
my co-workers built a server with 20 GB of mp3's and installed Shoutcast
on it which a good portion of us listened to all day--they said we were
producing so much network traffic that we were affecting access to their
mainframe.  Oops....

On the flip flip side, I own part of a company that specializes in email
issues for litigation.  My advice to you folks is don't use email for
anything exciting.  It will definitely come back to haunt you.  Course, it
may help you greatly--depending on which side of the "we got screwed" line
you're on.  Following that thought, it's very possible that companies are
increasing their Internet resource usage policies in order to reduce risk
to themselves.

Thoughts?
/will


On Mon, 10 Dec 2001, Jerry Feldman wrote:

> Many companies do look closely at people's Internet usage. During a previuous contract at a 
> certain defense contractor, I know one Unix admin who was fired based on his use of the Internet. 
> Even when one ran telnet, the telnet proxy came up with a warning that this was to be used for 
> company business only.....
> 
> Additionally, I was supposed to be writing device drivers. I was denied root privs on the 
> workstation I was using to write the device drivers (as were employees). After 6 weeks of 
> haranguing the IT people, they relented, but then went to security. The rule was that I could have 
> root priv, but only when an emplyee was watching my keystrokes. 
> I left at the end of my contract eventhough this could have been a long term deal wich also paid 
> relatively well. Too restrictive and too much crap. Another company which also did government 
> contracts complained about my email volumes, since I did get a lot of bounces from majordomo. 
> On 10 Dec 2001 at 9:39, Adam Russell wrote:
> 
> > Date: Sun, 9 Dec 2001 10:05:56 -0500 (EST)
> > >From: "Anthony J. Gabrielson"  <agabriel at home.tzo.org> 
> > >To: Dan Geer  <geer at world.std.com> 
> > >Cc: discuss at blu.org
> > >Subject: Re: privacy - 
> > 
> > >I expect it at work - that doesn't bother me.  My home home machine >w\o
> > >knowing it, would bother me. 
> >      Errrr.......where exactly do you work? I for one would be pretty surprised if *my* employer were log my every keystroke. Then again, I don't work with money or nuclear secrets. But even so, I would be willing to bet on more clever checks to my honesty than blindly recording *everything* I 
> would do.
> > 
> > 
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > PS: You should check out this great new site that I found. They've got free
> > movies, music, email. It's really great! http://www.netbroadcaster.com
> > _______________________________________________
> > Discuss mailing list
> > Discuss at blu.org
> > http://www.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
> 
> Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
> Associate Director
> Boston Linux and Unix user group
> http://www.blu.org
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Discuss mailing list
> Discuss at blu.org
> http://www.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
> 

-- 
whatever it is, you can find it at http://www.bluesock.org/~willg/
except Will--you can only see him in real life.