Employers and Cyberspace

“ As one would expect, the ability to follow employees in cyberspace presents employers with a mixed bag of benefits and burdens.” Dominick Bratti

Should employers track what websites their employee’s visit? At my office, there are certain websites that are off limits and we have software that will block those sites should someone try to access them. Of course, pornography sites are blocked, but also gambling sites including hotels and casinos. I am pretty sure someone is monitoring who goes where on the company computers; therefore, it’s best to not even try to go there. We are strictly prohibited from removing firewalls and termination is likely should that happen if someone was trying to access a restricted site.

Should potential employers review Facebook or MySpace when determining whether or not to hire a person? There have been several legal cases where employers have checked out the websites of their employees and then terminated them for what they found. Their job performance was not in question. Employers argue they are representing their company and the nature of the material contained in the site reflects badly on the employee and their work place.

Bratti, Dominick. "Tracking your employees' online activities." New Jersey Law Journal (Dec 31, 2007): NA. Academic OneFile. Gale. BCR Regis University. 19 Apr. 2008

1 comment:

Sean said...

The company I work for also blocks access to what they have deemed to be restricted content, or at the very least content outside the scope of what could be considered company business activities. The interesting thing about their choices is that they limit the news sites that we can access, and restrict any site containing the term 'blog' in the URL, site header, or metadata tags.