Beware! Your Boss Can See What You Are Doing

Not recommended for those having high proficiency in IT security or have wide knowledge in IT surveillance.

It's another day in Anne's life. She commutes from home as early as 7.15am and rushes to open the office. she went to the coffee and enjoyed her solitude. And as usual, she logged on to the Internet and starts reading what her friends are writing. As she was too engrossed in it, she finished reading at 9.20 am and starts working. Anne never thought that her superiors will find out about this activity, which happens almost daily. At times, she will be surfing the internet one hour well before lunch. Anne was sure that no one will notice what she did as she sat at the very corner of the office.

And of course she was really shocked to receive a warning letter on her Internet activity. Apparently, her employers are watching what she was doing, without having to look over her shoulders. Every activity she carried out was monitored.

Usually, offices install IT surveillance system on their network. This is to stop employees from visiting sites with abusive and offensive contents. And some just block community portals like facebook and MySpace; just to make sure the productivity of the employees are kept at the maximum.

There is a good reason why employers monitor what their workers are doing on their computer. Every time spent working or surfing was recoded, so as the keystrokes and log downloads. This means that you can be sitting at the very end of the cubicle and emailing your girlfriend or adik angkat or tok penghulu and you think your superiors will not notice when clearly they do. Some employers even took the step to install an IT surveillance system that can capture the snapshots on what employers are doing on their computer.

In terms of keywords, the IT surveillance system look for offensive keywords and such. The reason for this is some of the sites that contain adult-content comes with virus so stopping employees to visit the sites will save the employer from lots of trouble.

Of course, sending malicious stuff over the office email spelled trouble (you will be very surprised to find some people actually did this). However, this does not mean whatever we write on the Gmail or Yahoo accounts will be safe. Every keystrokes are monitored so the easiest way to do, refrain from talking trash about your employer. It's just too dangerous and not worth it.

To say this is unfair is going a bit too far. Most of the enterprises and companies state in their contract and agreement that there are some regulations on Internet usage and such. If, for some reason or another, the employer failed to elaborate on the regulations, take the initiative to ask as in this case, ignorance spells trouble, not bliss.

To be continued