Internet filtering specialists Websense said this week that according to a new survey, adult material online in the UK means new opportunities for consultancies and services whose client base would be businesses trying to keep their staffers from wasting time surfing Net porn.
But a concurrent headache in the British workplace is on-the-job child porn hunting and downloading—which businesses appear to be not only lost at stopping, according to a British Internet watchdog, but often fail to report employees’ illegal-porn site viewing to authorities.
Eskenzi Marketing did the study for Websense and discovered that while 72 percent of companies studied had to deal with Net misuse and abuse on the job in general, a quarter of them had had to fire people over Net abuse complaints—and 69 percent of those firings were tied to Net porn.
"If the channel could help companies devise a framework for acceptable use of the Net, less time would be wasted, fewer people would be sacked and less financial damage would be incurred by all parties," said Websense vice president Geoff Haggart to reporters about the survey. He also said the firings themselves prove costly in terms of sudden needs to train new people, though he also suggested that companies can make it up when former workers challenge the firings in court and end up having to pay legal fees to their former bosses in judgments.
Websense had already done a study that showed that workplace Web surfing has little or nothing to do with the job at hand and appears to be an overwhelming temptation on the job. That study, also released this week, said that half the workers the company surveyed use the Net on the job for work and personal business, though the most popular stops seemed to be news (81 percent), personal email (61 percent), online banking (58 percent), travel (56 percent), and shopping (52 percent).
"As the line between professional and personal usage of the Internet becomes more of a gray area, many employees have started to rely on the Internet to complete their job duties as well as perform personal tasks—during the work day," said Websense president Curt Staker in announcing those study results.
"In addition, with the sheer quantity and variety of websites and applications readily available, many employees are either not admitting to, or most likely not aware of, how much time they are really spending on personal surfing," he continued. "The solution lies in balancing employees’ needs for personal use of the Web at work without draining overall productivity, morale, or the company’s bottom line."
On the other hand, a concurrent poll by Harris Interactive – also for Websense – showed that a quarter of American men surveyed are likely to be surfing Net porn on the job. Polling 500 people, a quarter of the men and a mere 12 percent of the women admitted to finding porn on the job computer, while only 17 percent of the men admitted they watched it deliberately compared to 11 percent of the women.
Child-porn surfing protection
British businesses, however, have another problem that is a lot more severe than just adult Web surfing: the Internet Watch Foundation says most companies won't even think about calling police if they catch workers with child porn on their work computers.
The IWF said that 74 percent of 200 companies they polled said they would not report such incidents to authorities, and 38 percent wouldn't discipline or fire workers for downloading child porn on the job.
Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection Executive Director Joan Irvine told AVNOnline.com that, in her experience, companies already monitor employee phone calls, email, and Internet access, so workers "know they have no rights to privacy in the workplace." Thus, she says, companies must establish policies about what to do if child porn is found on workers' on-the-job computers.
Irvine agreed with the shock of company ignorance, noting that the adult Internet stays active against child porn through her group's efforts and supports the group's new child porn reporting hotline. "Mainstream companies have the same responsibility," she says.
IWF chief executive Peter Robbins called the results shocking, considering the workplace is where most people therein have Internet access. "It is essential that employees that monitor companies’ networks are aware of what guidelines they should take if they come across a potentially illegal image," Robbins said in a statement accompanying the study's release.
"However, the research has confirmed our expectations that a majority of IT managers are in fact uninformed of the correct procedure to follow, rather than being unwilling to sit up and act," he continued. "This is supported by the fact that 38 percent of IT managers questioned wouldn’t do anything or wouldn’t know what do if they caught an employee downloading illegal images of children."
A law allowing information technology managers to fight child porn found on their servers or on company computers took effect a year ago, but IWF said 80 percent of the IT managers they polled had no idea that they even have such recourse under the law. It allows a so-called "conditional defense," where an IT manager who has to catch and keep such images as evidence to present law enforcement or the IWF is protected from being accused of just being child porn possessors or traffickers.
"[I]t is vital that any organization providing Internet access to employees understands how to deal with these types of images," Robbins said in his statement. "Their policies must be in line with current UK legislation and internal procedures should be clearly explained to staff, including consequences for transgression. Once an appropriate Acceptable Internet Use Policy is in place, we believe that IT managers will have no hesitation in reporting their findings to the police or a law enforcement agency."
