Employers who give Internet access to their staffs are sending out a message: Look at porn, lose a paycheck.
Faced with international controversies over pornography and hate speech on the Internet, employers are setting polices to limit Internet usage to business purposes. They also are penalizing employees who send out abusive electronic mail, "flame" people on Usenet, or visit inappropriate sites on the World Wide Web. And they are cautioning employees to remember that out on the 'net, they represent their companies, not just themselves.
"Employees are under the misapprehension that the First Amendment applies in the workplaceit doesn't," said Neal J. Friedman, a Washington attorney who specializes in online law. "Employees need to know they have no right of privacy and no right of free speech using company resources."
Employers are hitting the hardest when sex and pornography are involved. Consider these recent examples: Some 98 employees at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, were disciplined last month when audits of system usage revealed that they used lab computers on their own time to access pornographic sites on the Web. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory became suspicious that employees were abusing the Internet when the staff set up sniffers to measure 'net traffic and found lots of hits going out to Playboy and Penthouse sites.
For most companies, an Internet usage policy is straightforward. It generally informs employees that their Internet access is a company resource that should be used only for their jobs.
"3M's policy is simply put: that the Web must be used for business purposes. If people get on and abuse it, then you've got a problem with that individual and need to handle it," said Luke Crofoot, a marketing services supervisor at 3M in St. Paul, Minnesota. Crofoot said he opposes draconian measures to control Internet use. "What really gets under my skin is the people who want to censor the world and place on me the burden of creating the infrastructure of what should and should not be censored," he said. Trying to control employee use of the Internet is nonproductive, he added. It is better to educate people about how to use the Internet and accept that at first they will spend a lot of time online looking up nonbusiness-related content, Crofoot said.
That approach may work for companies that give employees a lot of independence, said Barry Weiss, a partner at Gordon & Glickson, a Chicago law firm that specializes in information technology legal issues. But for firms that want more control over their employees, the best solution is to develop detailed Internet usage policies, he added. Companies that have detailed Internet usage policies in place or are developing them include The Chase Manhattan Bank NA; Johnson Controls, Inc.; Pioneer Hi-Bred International Inc.; and Monsanto Co.
"The Internet is essentially a communications tool," Weiss said. "It's important that companies think about the different ways that information will be communicated. They want to define policies and procedures to avoid risk so that this new technology will be used in an effective way."
Source: Adapted from Mitch Wagner, "Firms Spell Out Appropriate Use of Internet for Employees," Computerworld, February 5, 1996, pp. 56-58. Copyright © 1996 by Computerworld, Inc., Framingham, MA 01701Reprinted from Computerworld.