[techtalk] Sick of surf and porn addicts

[Neale Green]

----- Original Message -----
From: "James Sutherland" <jas88 at cam.ac.uk>
To: "Penguina" <penguina at cosyn.co.nz>
Cc: "Liese" <liese at pandora.be>; <techtalk at linuxchix.org>
Sent: Saturday, May 26, 2001 9:09 PM
Subject: Re: [techtalk] Sick of surf and porn addicts


> On Sat, 26 May 2001, Penguina wrote:
>
> > Why not write a script to put each users' web access cache list
> > (from the squid cache) up on an intranet web site--viewable by
> > their line supervisor--you know, the one who approved the account
> > in the first place.
>
> Liese said in her e-mail she couldn't do that: it would be an unlawful
> violation of the employees' privacy. I wouldn't expect my employer to post
> transcripts of my 'phone calls on the intranet - so why should the content
> of my TCP sessions be any different?

Actually, James, the squid cache is very different from the content of any
sessions, it's merely a list of the sites visited. Many ISPs harvest the top
count cache hits and list them as points which may be of interest to others.

At work, we have had to provide squid caches for court cases in regard to
porn, as these are the only items that you can generally harvest WITHOUT
perfoming unlawful privacy breaches. The industries that our customers are
in ensure that we do not skirt the edges of lawfullness, we cleave wholly to
the letter of the law, even if it were our inclination to do otherwise.

It is actually a good practice to do what Penguina suggested, it keeps
employees away from inappropriate ( or even illegal ) porn etc sites, as
they know that they are accountable for where they go. I would be VERY
surprised if the conditions of net access in any business didn't include a
prohibitation against accessing inapporopriate sites. If people want to
wallow in smut, they can do it at home, and pay for the access themselves
( if they have to buy the magazines, they can buy the rest of their smut as
well ( that's my view anyway ) ).

Even if Liese's problem is primarily bandwidth, creating a situation whereby
people refrain from accessing porn, games or whatever sites all day from
work would have the effect of dramatically reducing the bandwidth usage,
legitimate usage rarely sucks as much bandwidth as downloading pictures or
games from the net.

As for leaving a company that imposes restrictions such as this, within a
very short time, this will seriously restrict your choice of campanies, as
businesses are being forced to go this way, to reduce their own liability in
harassment cases etc. If a business cannot show that employees were formally
advised that such material is inapproprite and forbidden, and that they have
taken some measures to prevent the use of their facilities to obtain same,
they may be ( and some companies have been ) held liable in cases where
offensive material is transmitted or displayed so as to be held as
harassment by individuals. It's an unfortunate fact of life that some people
need external controls to ensure proper behaviour, and displaying a record
of accesses is one such form of control. Anyway, as noted above, in my view
people should be getting access to such things from home, not from work.

Sorry to ramble on so much, but this is a subject that I've dealt with a
great deal at work.

Neale