"There is the expectation of privacy on the part of the employee"

06/18/2002

By Dave Fehling / 11 News

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HOUSTON (KHOU) -- Earlier this year, there was a controversy in West University Place over the police chief looking at porn websites while on the job. How did the city know it was happening? Because its computers are under surveillance.

If you work in an office, what's the harm of doing a little shopping on the Internet? Or surfing the web for a little naughty entertainment. Who'd know? Oh, maybe just -- your boss.

And the reason why is a Houston company that developed the software that allows bosses to monitor who's working and who's loafing.

Umesh Verma is the boss at Blue Lance Software. Verma says companies should tell their employees that they are monitoring their computer use because, she says, "Inherently there is the expectation of privacy on the part of the employee."

One national survey of big companies found that over half of them were monitoring what their employees were doing on the Internet. And nearly as many were watching their employees email. In Houston, some of the biggest employers have struggled with their right to know versus their employees right to privacy.

James Bradley manages the University of Houston's computer systems and says contrary to what you might think, you don't have any right to privacy when it comes to using your company's computer. At least not in the United States.

"In England, they've just changed the rules and said, nope," says Bradley. "That is private and an employer doesn't have the right to monitor it."

Reliant Energy may have found a middle ground. As a general rule, the company says it doesn't read its employees email or check which websites they've visited. But if it suspects a particular employee of laziness or wrongdoing, they monitor logs generated every ten seconds.

"It give us, if we want to find out for a specific individual," explains Don Granger. "We know when they logged into their work station, when they logged out of their work station."

And Reliant's computer security chief says its no secret. "Basically, every employee who comes to work signs a computer resource document when they're hired," says Granger. "It outlines the do's and don'ts of what they can do with their work station."

How good is the snooping software?

"We've worked at becoming the best in the breed in that area," says Verma. The software developer remembers one case: someone inside a bank was using the computer system to embezzle millions from trust funds. An initial search of computer logs pointed to long time employee.

"Question was," Verma asks. "Why would somebody who's been a trusted employee for over 20 years as a supervisor do something like this?"

So, using their software, they launched a much deeper search and found that another employee, using a complicated series of computer maneuvers, had stolen the long-time employee's log-on identity.

According to Verma that's what frequently happens in an organization. The perpetrator can cast doubt on someone else, make it look like they did it.

In cases of true crime, critics usually don't fault companies for snooping on suspect employees.

But Bradley is against using the software like a cyber Big Brother, watching your every click of the mouse. He says, "I think most people who use a computer would say, 'I'm just doin' stuff and working and if I take a two minute break to look at CNN, why do you care?'"

Whether it seems fair or not, the reality is that what you do on a company computer system is their business, not just yours.

There's one big reason that going on-line at work is so tempting – it's faster. Most companies have better Internet connections than people have at home. According to one survey about a third of office workers spend two-and-a-half-hours a week online for personal reasons.