Employers tighten restrictions on employee Web surfing

[Kristijntje]

Tasha Newitt was aware her employer, the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries, had a policy restricting personal use of work computers, but she believed it focused on Web surfing, not e-mail. Nonetheless, she was careful to use her work e-mail primarily for professional matters. So she was stunned when the agency fired her after finding 418 personal e-mail messages received over a period of five months (or about 5 per workday) on her PC.

Newitt isn't alone: Increasingly, managers are cracking down on employee Internet activity by drafting strict usage policies--and enforcing them through use of software that monitors surfing, examines e-mail, and restricts the sites an employee can browse to...

full article: http://pcworld.com/article/id,126835-c,w...ticle.html

[mandy]

A related topic:

Jersey City municipal workers will now have to check their MySpace.com profile at home.

By the end of this week, the city's 1,050 computer work stations will be outfitted with a program that prevents access to sexually oriented Web sites, and several other popular Internet spots, such as MySpace.com and eBay, a city spokesman said...

"The goal is to maximize the efficiency of the roughly 2,800-person municipal work force," city spokesman Stan H. Eason said...

full article: http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/jersey/ind...272770.xml&coll=1