OnYourMark, LLC Blog

This month‘s Pro is Ellen Rohr, Production Manager at OnYourMark, LLC. Ellen offers advice on how to supervise your employees’ behavior online.

Please note that the following is not meant to be construed as legal advice, just the sharing of our own insights and experience.

With the abundance of questionable material on the Internet, coupled with increasing legal concerns over harassment, employers need to be more careful than ever when it comes to employee behavior online. As an employer, your company has the right to monitor Internet use and reprimand employees exploiting this tool for the wrong reasons.

Create a Media Usage Policy
Creating an Internet usage policy not only protects an employer’s interests, it clearly defines what employees can and cannot do online. Written policies don’t have to stop at Internet use. At OnYourMark, LLC, our employees receive a “Media Usage Policy” which covers the appropriate use of phones, email, faxes, instant messages and many other forms of communication.

A media usage policy should cover what types of media are unacceptable to view in a professional setting. Pornography, gambling and online gaming websites, discriminatory material, chat rooms and multimedia (streaming audio and video) are often banned by employers. The policy should be clearly state the company’s stance on personal communications during business hours. If your company does monitor employee communications, be sure to disclose this in the policy (though specific methods of tracking do not need to be listed). Also list the penalties for an employee caught violating the policy.

Have every employee read and sign the policy, and keep a copy in the employee’s personnel file. Be sure to review and revise your media usage policy often, as new forms of communications appear in today’s business world faster than ever before.

Viewing Cookies and the Cache
Web browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox store “cookies” and a “cache” of webpage content. “Cookies” are small text files placed on your computer to store information from a website. The “cache” stores temporary files from a website, such as images, on your computer. When you return to the page, your computer is able to retrieve files from the cache, making the page load faster.

Cookies and the cache will give you information about where an employee has surfed online. Most cookies will be listed according to the website they are related to (ex: microsoft.com, www.yahoo.com). Sites that carry third-party advertising may place several cookies at once; one from the originating site and one from each ad server (ex: advertising.com, doubleclick.com). Instructions on viewing Internet Explorer’s cookies and cache features can be found on Microsoft’s website. Firefox’s cookies and cache features can be accessed by clicking Tools > Options > Privacy within the browser.

Software and Solutions
Many software programs, such as ActMon or Spector Pro exist to monitor Internet usage. Programs such as these can take screen shots of an employee’s activity, or monitor keystrokes. A keystroke monitor records every key pressed on a keyboard. Many keystroke monitoring programs can be downloaded for free. Be very cautious with keystroke software; we do not recommend using free programs! Many keystroke monitoring programs have been identified as spyware. Since a keystoke monitor logs every key pressed, confidential data such as credit card numbers, usernames and passwords can be logged and distributed into the wrong hands.

Some programs used online already have built-in security and privacy tools. Internet Explorer’s Content Advisor is built into the browser and can be activated and password-protected at any time. Content Advisor relies heavily on PICS tags. PICS tags are used to tell a web browser how much violence, nudity and sexual material, language, discriminatory content or chat are featured on a site. Most sites with zeros in all categories will be allowed through the Content Advisor, even at its strictest settings. As the amount of questionable content increases on a site, the Content Advisor will know to block it from view.

We install PICS tags on every page of OnYourMark, LLC hosted sites. This ensures that our clients’ sites will be allowed though the Content Advisor, no matter what! Without a PICS tag, the Content Advisor cannot determine a site’s content and may block it completely!

Links Mentioned in this Article:

- microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.mspx
- mozilla.org/products/firefox/
- actmon.com
- spectorsoft.com
- onyourmark.com/tutorials/rsac.html

What would you like to ask the pro? Email your questions to askthepro@OnYourMark.com!