John Conlin is browsing around some company's network again. Click-clickâ€"now he's searching employees' email by keywords. Not only can he sniff out which Web sites workers have visited, but he can see how long they were there and at what time. All this snooping leaves no tracks.
What Conlin does is not illegal. In fact, it's probably already happening at your company. If not, just wait. Conlin's company, eSniff, sells an electronic monitoring device that allows businesses to spy on their workers. It may sound like a scene from 1984. But as either an employee or a manager, you'd better get used to it. Last year some 82 percent of businesses monitored their employees in some way, according to the American Management Association.
It's not hard to see why. The Net provides all kinds of productivity-frittering distractionsâ€"from instant messaging to eBay, pornography, and sports scores. Worse, company secrets may be floating across your firewall. And what you dismiss as simple timewasting could be setting you up for harassment, discrimination, copyright infringement, and other lawsuits.
