Avoiding liabilities
"Monitoring software can and certainly does assist organisations in minimising the risks discussed above because employers are able to use the software to get early notice of any offending conduct and take immediate disciplinary action," says Gamertsfelder.
"Software does not provide a complete answer," warned White, "but it does provide a compliance method to ensure compliance with good practices and the employer's instructions."
Smith recommends risk mitigation by "having a clear set of policies, running a risk assessment and following information standards such as ISO/IEC 17799."
On the other hand, the use of this type of technology can have downsides.
The failure of Web filtering to distinguish adequately between porn and medical information has been widely canvassed--though you'd have to ask whether it was appropriate for either to be accessed in a typical workplace during business hours.
It has also been widely suggested that some of these products block legitimate sites according to the political prejudices and agendas of those responsible for developing the software.
An organisation can easily be held up to public ridicule when the filtering of incoming e-mail goes wrong. If a message is automatically bounced on the basis of what is actually innocuous content, there's nothing to stop the sender sharing the "joke" with thousands of other people.
Indeed, a columnist in a major metropolitan newspaper poked fun at his own company's attempt to implement e-mail filtering when a number of stories being filed by correspondents were rejected on the grounds of improper content.
You might guess why a reference to "Roger the horse" attracted the program's attention, but it is doubtful that any human reader would have flinched at the passage.
That problem is largely a matter of the sensitivity of the filter and how well it can discriminate between the same words in different contexts.
You might want to protect your employees from spam, especially the more lurid kind, but what's worse: several dodgy messages getting through, or one bona fide communication being blocked?
For this reason, Baltimore employs linguists to help create systems that can identify the context in which words and phrases are used. "In a general office environment, it's a lot easier [than in specialist situations such as medicine]," says Chuawiwat, "but the software is very flexible."
Similar problems can arise when attempting to filter graphics. One story--possibly apocryphal--doing the rounds is that one Victorian municipality installed software to prevent the transfer of images containing excessive skin tones, only to find that the council's own logo failed the test and was blocked.
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