63% Of Corporations Plan To Read Outbound Email 565
John writes "Aviran's place reports that a recent survey of 332 technology decision-makers at large U.S. companies reveals that more than 63% of corporations with 1,000 or more employees either employ or plan to hire workers to read outbound email, due to growing concern over sensitive information leaving the enterprise through email."
Gentlemen don't read others gentlemen's mail... (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember that signature on that thick paper you've signed prior getting that high paid tech job? The one saying that everything you think of during working hours is theirs? The one that maybe is saying (in some cases) that everything you think on and off during working hours, while employed or 3 years after also belongs to them?
Well, it seems to me, and I might be way off here, that thinking up an email by an employee is in fact his company's property and hence, they have all the rights to read it, and it doesn't breaks anyone's right to privacy.
Can anyone with legal experience enlighten me on this one? Do the bastards have the right to do so, provided that one doesn't sign a document that explicitly states "you can read my email" but instead contains a fine version of "all your bases, off lunch hours, belongs to us?
Hushmail ! (Score:1, Interesting)
Oblig. Simpsons (Score:1, Interesting)
I, for one, welcome our new IT-geek overlords.
My company scans all email for buzzwords (Score:5, Interesting)
Your base belong to them, but only if you say so (Score:2, Interesting)
As I recall, the right to privacy applies only when and where one has a reasonable expectation of privacy. If you're in your employer's facility, on their equipment, using software licensed to them and interacting with servers owned by them; you've no more expectation of privacy than you do on a CB channel. Their ability to check your e-mail is roughly analogous to the rules that enable you to record phone calls in your own home if you inform the person who calls that they are being recorded (rule varies from State to State).
Re:Gentlemen don't read others gentlemen's mail... (Score:3, Interesting)
Good luck with your new job. (Score:1, Interesting)
I got a better question. Are all you trying to slip corporate information out the door, and why? This really is much ado about nothing. Same with them listening in on your phone converstations. And NO, you have little to no expectation of privacy, constitution or not while at work.
Lucent / ATT does it (Score:3, Interesting)
What's funny about this is that I told him they recorded every keystroke on the UNIX boxes (no one used Windows except for Word and Excel) and that they had a visible and hidden copy of the log file so they could compare. They probably had a third, but I only found the first two.
In today's companies, I find it amusing that they would claim to hire people to sift through outgoing email. My company won't hire people to train internal staff to do their jobs. Instead they pay people to correct the mistakes. It's a joke.
I've had to read peoples' emails when HR asks for emails related to a specific topic (usually legal), and I can tell you it's like washing someone else's laundry: it's voyueristic at first, but after a while, it's just dirty laundry.
This only works on the stupid (Score:5, Interesting)
I once worked at a small software firm (50 emplyees) and we "merged" with a larger one. What was once an open workplace of mutual respect quickly became one location of seemingly untrusted drones. The new corporate office demanded a firewall, so they could watch what we visited. They snooped people's Exchange folders. Etc.
It had never occured to me to betray my employer. But when they started treating us as untrustworthy, my fellow admins and I came up with all manner of methods to thwart the security measuress. It helped, of course, that we were privy to those measures, which we were sure to disclose to fellow workers who had no idea.
And you'd better be *really* thorough with that Acceptable Use Policy. :) Sure, you can watch what I visit on the web, but it may only *seem* innocuous. One user on the inside may be sending weird HTTP requests to a legit-looking site. But in reality, those requests are lines of an ASCII armoured PGP file (properly URL-encoded, of course).
I don't care if it's the company email server, on company time, yadda-yadda-yadda. And I don't care if the ream of paper I signed to put food on the table gives them the right to records phone calls, archive email, and takes ownership of portions of my brain -- 'cause they *all* do it these days. It's not outright collusion, but the end result is pretty much the same.
If the company expects me to interrupt home/private time for their beneift, they'd better damned well respect my privacy on the job, because there's little time to tend to personal affairs requiring 9-to-5 services otherwise.
"That badge don't make you right."
Re:Yeah this is great (Score:4, Interesting)
So, yes, companies are reading that too.
Re:Yeah this is great (Score:1, Interesting)
On a similair vein, HP has also outlawed 802.11b other than their own official, secured, VPN-required system, and cordless phones and headsets are not allowed either (though certain Plantronics headsets that do some form of scrambling or encryption are allowed on a case-by-case basis).
Posting AC do I don't get fired for leaking corporate secrets... but they do seem to have a clue about security, and are not too draconian in their efforts to keep their secrets safe.
Re:Gentlemen don't read others gentlemen's mail... (Score:3, Interesting)
A company may record all emails for legal reasons. They may be compelled to turn them over to a court or some regulatory agency. The use of personal email could be viewed by a hostile plantiff, court, or agency as circumvention of data retention in order to hide misconduct or other illegal activities. Things are far more complicated than you suggest. If you want privacy don't use company computers and resources.
Re:Hellooooo encryption (Score:3, Interesting)
Hello reprimand or unemployment. *shakes head*
Yeah, make sure look like the person leaking company info or products, draw attention to yourself as someone who needs more surveilance.
Re:Our company already does...internal AND ext. (Score:3, Interesting)
A paycheck isn't worth it and I'm not being glib. If my boss started reading all of my email I'd walk.
Solution: Move to Australia! (Score:2, Interesting)
NSW: Employers to risk charges for spying on worker's emails
Wednesday, 04 May, 2005
Content provided to you by AAP
SYDNEY, May 4 AAP - Employers who read workers' private emails may soon risk criminal charges with legal safeguards being introduced today by the NSW government.
NSW will be the first Australian state to outlaw unauthorised spying of employees using technologies including video cameras, email and tracking devices with the introduction of the Workplace Surveillance Bill 2005 to state parliament today.
The new laws will make it a criminal offence to take part in any form of covert surveillance unless an employer can prove they had reasonable suspicion of wrong doing by an employee.
"While some employers argue that this is necessary to protect their legitimate interests, employees expect that their private correspondence, like their private telephone calls or private conversations, should never be the subject of secret monitoring," NSW Attorney General Bob Debus said in a statement today.
"We don't tolerate employers unlawfully placing cameras in change rooms and toilets. "Likewise, we should not tolerate unscrupulous employers snooping into the private emails of workers."
The new laws will strike a balance between an employee's right to privacy and the legitimate needs of employers to protect their intellectual and commercial property, he said.
"Unless employers have a court order, they would need to give employees notice that surveillance will be conducted," Mr Debus said.
Re:Well (Score:1, Interesting)
Origin of "Get paid to read email" CL posts? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:one word for you (Score:2, Interesting)
Why do I think they have a right to? Simple, I have to trust them with my personal financial information as does practically anyone who uses a credit card, thus I want them to protect it. That protection is an obligation, not an invasion of my own or anyone else's privacy.
Furthermore encrypting doesn't necessarily protect your privacy on a work computer.
Encrypting only stops them from decyphering what was sent, not what was originally created as it was in the process of the creation. With a solid security scheme in place, I expect the system records everything and flags long numbers, curse words and clipboard pastes. I certainly hope it does anyway.
Bottom line. Don't trust anything to be secure unless you own the box and know how to keep it secure yourself. Even then, assume somebody smarter than you might figure out a way past it and try to keep the damage potential to a minimum just in case.
Re:Gentlemen don't read others gentlemen's mail... (Score:2, Interesting)
The part that amazes me these days is that people bother to send personal email through their work address when perfectly good webmail clients exist (*cough*gmail*cough*). Yes, your employer can probably see that you're surfing Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo/Home *nix Server. However, your email is not likely to be captured by their system, and remains private.
So, why do people still use work for private mail?
At the company I work for, and I imagine others as well, webmail sites are blocked at the proxy server. They want all of the mail to go through one entry/exit point, just like all of the web traffic does. Of course I can think of about five ways to circumvent this, but the vast majority of employees will just accept that they are not supposed to use webmail.
Personally, since it's their internal network and hardware, I don't care if they look at every bit that goes in and out of my (work) desktop. I have nothing to hide, and if I have some sort of sensitive private communication to make, I can wait until I get home or go outside and use my cell phone. I don't see the problem here.
Re:Gentlemen don't read others gentlemen's mail... (Score:3, Interesting)
Username/Password/PIN plus 8392, divided by 2, rounded down, and offset one key up (with wraparound) on the numeric keypad. The parameters of which are calculated differently for every login attempt, of course.
Re:Gentlemen don't read others gentlemen's mail... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've never gotten the "sign here to allow the company to read your email" letter before, but over and over I've gotten the one that says "I understand that there is absolutely no guarantee of privacy when using company computers/networks. Company computers/networks are to be used only for company business. Personal use of company computers/networks is grounds for dismissal." I don't work for a Fortune 500 company, I work for a school district. What kind of trade secrets am I going to leak? 2+2=4? No Child Left Behind is a bad idea? But as anti-big brother as I am I think this is perfectly reasonable. While you're at work they own your ass--and they own the computer and they own the network. They have the right to do whatever they want with their property.
I was actually a juror on a wrongful termination case about a year ago. The plaintiff said she was fired because she was pregnant, but the defense was ready with all her personal emails she sent from work. Hundreds of them! Racist jokes, bullying/humiliation of coworkers, invitations to happy hour, bids sent to competing vendors (oops!), booking vacations, getting mortgage rate quotes, etc. Then they whipped out the "I understand that my email is not private at work and I can't use it for personal business and if I do I can be fired" document signed by the plaintiff and it was all over. This small company had actually fired a few people for email abuse already.
They pay you to work. If you send out the occasional personal email they probably won't give you static about it. But if you send so much personal email that they wonder when you have time to work there will be problems. There really shouldn't be any outrage about it.
Re:Some companies are required by law to snoop. (Score:2, Interesting)
What steps do you take to ensure that the monitoring itself does not constitute a violation of the confidentiality provisions of the law? You are adding eyes to confidential material when you do this. It occurs to me that when you take information that had been between a health care practitioner and the patient, and you insert "4 programmers, a network admin, 2 help desk people, a production operator, 3 business analyst and a manager" in between them, you have violated the very spirit of the idea that the communication was supposed to be confidential!
What kind of bonding or licensing do you require for the IT staff?
Re:I work for a bank. (Score:2, Interesting)
I've only been in a situation one time where this applied to me, with any degree of risk. Early in 1986 while working for Haynes & Boone, I knew about the takeover bid for Safeway. This wasn't revealed to the general stockholders/employees until the next quarter -- when they started receiving litigation documents and tender offers and stuff like that, that we were already preparing.
At the time, I didn't have any money or even much of an idea what could be done with this kind of information, but it was certainly made very clear to me that it would be a Very Bad Thing to discuss the minimal information I had with anyone outside the firm, or to do any trading based on the information. I'm sure at the time, just the idea that I could lose that shiddy job was enough to keep me honest. The only thing I was really aware of, was that I was part of the process of making a whole lot of people lose their jobs, and asking them to sell their stock at rock bottom price (or risk holding it to zero, I suppose). I remember it didn't bother me at the time, because I perceived these people as being in a higher class than I was in, what with their good jobs and having enough money to buy things like stock in a company. Hell, they probably owned late model cars, lived in houses, that sort of high-falutin' lifestyle. Here I was with a college degree working for a bunch of Texas assholes, not even making enough money to meet my modest expenses. In other words, I was in exactly the kind of position that, had I known how to do it, I could have been pushed into the sort of rebellious mode where I might have taken advantage of this. I mean, I can tell you for a fact that same year, I drove drunk, discharged a firearm inside the city limits, smoked marijuana, and jaywalked (on the way to the courthouse to pay a traffic ticket, I got a ticket for jaywalking!) So the slippery slope theory practically *required* me to do some securities fraud, right? Well, I didn't have any idea about that sort of thing, and I didn't exactly have a whole lot of money anyway. So I guess it's a good thing... Jeez, I just remembered, that was the same year I applied to the police department (I was desperate), and they almost took me! Holy cow.
That Michael J. Fox movie wasn't out yet, or "Wall Street" with the Sheens, but I must admit, after seeing that movie I fantasized about getting rich through questionable means
(If my employer is reading this, I have since rehabilitated myself and can categorically assure you that I entertain no such notions, nor would I act upon them, were I in a position to do so.)
(If you worked for Safeway in 1986, I'm really sorry. I was too much of a punkass to recognize a human face on that paperwork.)
The situation in France (Score:3, Interesting)
Not a protection if intruder controls the browser (Score:2, Interesting)
However, in a company setting, this is no problem, as the company can easily set up its own certification authority, and install the CA certificate in all its employee's browsers as part of the standard installation procedure.
Re:Not a protection if intruder controls the brows (Score:3, Interesting)
It will also ring the alarm bells if the certificate you downloaded at home is tainted by the home ISP's SSL interceptor though. But at least you know that one of your points of entry into the internet is 0wn3d.
Re:Gentlemen don't read others gentlemen's mail... (Score:5, Interesting)
The arguement is simple and well covered, the company owns the computer, your email, and anything you do on company time.
The only grey areas are 'does the company have the right to go through email you deleted', and 'does the company own something you did using company resources in your own time.'
I mix personal email with company email; as do many others...
I say openly to other employees "Yes, I can read your email. Yes, it's not private. Yes, we own it. BUT, The company and I don't care what you and your friends talk about and what you do on the weekend." If you're not trading secrets, resumes or bagging the company, even if we do read your email, we don't CARE.
If you're worried about privacy in a 1000+ employee company, remember this:
You're just not that important.
Technology exists for this (Score:2, Interesting)
Companies do need to protect themselves. There's some very interesting development in that area, in fact. http://www.vidius.com/ [vidius.com]
Re:Gentlemen don't read others gentlemen's mail... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yep. I also recall that you can't waive your rights in a contract. Sadly, privacy isn't an actual right in the US.
Unless your company blocks outgoing ports, you can always just run your own mail server at home, and communicate with it via SMTP/TLS. I do this and I also don't use my ISP's relays except for those few destinations that refuse to talk to a "residential" mail server. That way, any destination systems that speak SMTP/TLS will get my mail without anyone who would archive or read my mail getting an unencrypted copy other than the target system.
Even funnier (Score:5, Interesting)
Company secrets leaking out through email? Hell. 80GB walking out, as per company rules, in my backpack every single day.
Maybe justifiable action? (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to work for a university in the MBA school. In order to get the best possible professors for our students we had to allow them to do consulting for large companies on the Uni's time as we couldn't afford to pay them what the going market rate was. This practice was regulated in that they could only spend 30% of their time consulting and they couldn't use any of the schools recourses (IE letter heads, websites, secretaries etc..). Now on the face of it this worked well for both parties as we got the best from industry plus the profs got the salary they had come accustom to. However, as human nature would have it, the profs got greedy and started abusing their position and students started to take notice that the very expensive course they had just paid for was suffering. So as IT we were charged with implementing all sorts of monitoring to gather evidence of these facts to weed out bad apples, otherwise the school would go bust and 100's of people would lose their job. The loss of privacy I can live with, the loss of a single mum's job because of a greed fat man I can't. If faced with that decision again, I would make the same choice in a heart beat.
There is also another good reason for this which is not entirely related to sensitive information leaving the company via company email and that is the sexual harasment/bulling. It is necessary to monitor email to limit this kind of activity before it blows up in your face. We recently did a audit of email boxes and found that 60% stored what would be considered (by law in Australia) as a offensive amount of porn that the company could be and would be held laibale for. What was worst was massive internal/external mail groups that were being sent to. I have no problem with porn (of the legal kind) just view it and send it on your own time. No one likes to see you spanking it at your desk!
Re:Gentlemen don't read others gentlemen's mail... (Score:2, Interesting)
Prior to 3 years ago our organization has had 2 worm outbreaks in 1 year both of them have been because of webmain clients. After putting into place webmail blocking we have had no virus or worms in the last 3 years.