More Web-surfing social butterflies get caught in boss's net

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — When Brad Cloverdyke sits down at his computer at American Century Investments, he can't visit MySpace.com.

The site is blocked.

At the Bank of Blue Valley, Jackie Vogt trains employees that they are not to use the bank's computers to do anything that is not work-related, not even on their lunch hours.

At Aquila, Kelly Murphy can't log on unless she acknowledges a message that says, in part: "This system is for authorized business use only. Unauthorized access or activity is a violation of law. All system activity is subject to monitoring for security purposes."

Many employers are getting stricter about Internet and e-mail access at work.

"There are some area companies that are really on top of this," said Mark Johnson, a computer forensic examiner at the Grant Thornton accounting firm in Kansas City. He is called in to investigate computer misuse.

"But huge numbers of employees are still going to MySpace or browsing porn at work because they're less afraid of getting caught there than at home by their wives."

Expect more employers to block more Web sites as employment-law attorneys and human-resource managers beat the drum for stricter controls. That often includes blocking instant messaging and sometimes even access to outside Web portals such as AOL, Yahoo! and MSN.

Companies are reining in Internet use partly for legal liability reasons, partly for productivity reasons and partly to protect proprietary information.

At Aquila, an employee who tries to visit a "personal" site gets a message that says the site is "blocked by proxy."

Access to a known pornographic site may be blocked completely. Access to a more general site, such as YouTube.com, may be granted on "quota time" that is doled out in 10-minute increments.

Vogt, the Bank of Blue Valley's vice president of training and human resources, said the bank has heavily encrypted firewalls and the ability to monitor each employee's computer use, if warranted.

"It comes down to the fact that the equipment belongs to the bank and should be used for bank purposes," Vogt said. "If employees are messing around on eBay or PayPal, that could slow down the resources of others who are really trying to work, so we just say our work computers are for work."

Workers who go online or download programs may create a bandwidth problem and bog down the speed of network operations, said Duncan Alexander, founder of Alexander Open Systems, an Overland Park, Kan., information technology company.

"If you have a bunch of workers, for example, who have WeatherBug running at the bottom of their screens, giving constant feeds about the weather, or if you have people downloading music or even movies, it can affect the time it takes to do your real business online," Alexander said. "It probably won't crash your network, but it will definitely slow things down.

"If you're trying to download patches for your servers, and others are sitting there downloading music, it's a real productivity issue."

Cloverdyke said American Century is most concerned about security, and that influences why sites such as MySpace are blocked. But, he noted: "We have access to eBay, for example. It's a shopping site. We know people are busy and sometimes need to take care of personal business at work. But we do focus first on productivity, on whether you're meeting expectations for your job."

John Mallery, a computer security expert at BKD, an accounting and advisory firm with offices in Kansas City, said there were big three reasons why employers block site access:

• Security: "There are numerous sites that can install adware or spyware onto a computer," Mallery said.

"Also, there are online storage and file-sharing sites, such as www.biscu.com, www.xdrive.com or www.elephantdrive.com, that can be used to share proprietary information."

Employers need to be aware of those sites and block access from work, he said.

• Legal liability: "Employees that are allowed to surf indiscriminately can expose their employers to legal problems," Mallery said. "If employees see pornography, hate sites, extreme religious sites and so forth on co-workers' monitors, that is a lawsuit waiting to happen."

• Productivity: "Having employees spend their workday posting to personal blogs, planning weddings and vacations, shopping online, researching family genealogy, day trading, participating in online dating services or losing money on gambling sites keeps employees from doing the jobs they were hired to do," Mallery said.

A survey released recently by OfficeTeam, a staffing service, found that the 559 office workers surveyed admitted spending an average 36 minutes a day on personal tasks, some of which may have involved Internet use.

The survey also reached 150 executives, who estimated that the average time was 43 minutes a day.

Mallery said that when employers hire him to conduct random reviews of employee computer use, they "are very surprised by what some of their employees are doing online."

Johnson agreed.

"Then most employers — if they didn't have an Internet-use policy signed by employees — are shocked that they can't just fire the porn-viewer immediately," he said.

Heading off problems before they occur, with Internet and e-mail rules spelled out in company handbooks, is the best policy, according to authorities.

And the "best policy" is evolving.

"Computer forensics is really just ramping up," Johnson said.

"We're really just beginning to get the message out widely that every click leaves a trail, that if a boss harasses someone in e-mail, it's traceable, and that even some voice-mail systems have retrievable messages."