There's no shortage of tools to monitor and filter employees' use of the Internet and IT resources. But can blocking really save you the outrageous sums of money the vendors claim? And is cyberbludging an issue of technology or management?
Just as technology makes it easier for people to do their work, it also makes it easier for managers to keep track of what their staff is doing.
GPS-based systems might simplify navigation for delivery drivers, but they can also be used to report the vehicle's location every few minutes.
Recordings made at call centres "for quality assurance purposes" could be used to teach agents how best to handle an irate customer, but they can also be misused for disciplinary purposes if an agent puts customer service ahead of call duration benchmarks.
In the IT world, monitoring products can be used to ensure that sufficient bandwidth is available for mission-critical applications or to alert a user's manager if they attempt to download a music file.
They can prevent employees' mailboxes from being overloaded with spam, or they can prevent the use of e-mail for private purposes. They can protect users from shady Web site operators who get their traffic by using domain names that match common typos when entering popular domains, or they can log every site someone visits and the amount of time they spend there.
In this special feature, we look at some of the products available, and the tradeoffs between managing IT infrastructure, employee relations, and security.
Inside this story
- Finding efficiencies
- I fought the law and the law won
- Avoiding liabilities
- Other benefits
- Cyberbludging
- Ethics of surveillance
- Privacy
- 10 ways to minimise cyberbludging
What can they do?
Broadly speaking, monitoring products fall into four categories: Web monitors/filters, e-mail monitors/filters, keystroke and usage monitors, and traffic shapers.
"The last statistic we saw was that there are three million new Web pages a month," says Adam Barnard, head of sales and marketing at Tel.Net Media.
While Tel.Net's Internet Sheriff filtering tool incorporates a blacklist-including the Australian Broadcasting Authority's list--it performs real-time content analysis to categorise material. The software uses Bayesian statistical techniques to classify unknown content in 46 preset categories plus any custom categories.
"We've done things a bit smarter than our competitors," he says, "we're using some of the clever stuff that's been developed in Australia." Barnard estimates that this dynamic modelling method takes the place of around 300 people working to classify material.
Administrators can set thresholds for action, such as blocking content if there is a 10 percent or greater chance that it is pornographic. Blocked URLs are automatically forwarded to Tel.Net for human review, and if necessary they are added to the blacklist.
Bayes' theorem describes "how the conditional probability of each of a set of possible causes, given an observed outcome, can be computed from knowledge of the probability of each cause and of the conditional probability of the outcome, given each cause" (from the Infoplease Dictionary).
This provides a way of determining the likelihood that a particular Web page fits into a certain category by combining information such as the occurrence of certain indicative words or phrases, the ratio of such words or phrases to the remaining text, the presence of links to sites known to be in that category, and the ratio of graphical to total content.
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