Workplace Email Monotiring ?
The wife has just got a "interesting" reply and quote from her Boss regarding a Email sent to a friend from her work account.
By all accounts the boss can monitor whatever they want.
Anyone gone down this road .....?
Surely they have to inform you in a work contract?
He's a Lawyer.....
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All work Email is monitored regardless of where you work.
The work Email account is their property and all correspondence on the address is their property.
If your wife was stupid enough to send private material through her work address, she has no one to blame except herself.
She needs to use a Gmail etc account and access it through a browser. Then it is none of their business.
cobra679 (09-01-16),OSIRUS (11-01-16),Seymour Butts (09-01-16),sublib25 (09-01-16),Tiny (09-01-16)
Yes, working for various government departments.
Email and browsing all monitored and recorded, together with database access.... all logged.
sublib25 (09-01-16)
Ive been going through a large machine purchase from the US over the Christmas/new years break.
Ive had the machine manufacturer, the foreign exchange company and the freight forwarder/customs brokers have the people who dealt with my account all have workers taking holidays through the Christmas/new years holiday period, yet someone else from the company has managed to open all the emails from each person on holidays and take over my dealings with them.
So it seams to me like most companies are setup to have emails opened by other people to see whats going on.
sublib25 (09-01-16)
Key stroke monitoring can also occurOriginally Posted by sublib25
Not sure if its legal, but i know a few business's that secretly use it to pin point employees that are lazy and spend too much time doing "other" online activity whilst being paid to work.
Its amazing what the find.
Online dating accounts would be the biggest thing
Last edited by ol' boy; 09-01-16 at 08:20 AM.
If u want to go on an expedition get a Land Rover, if u want to come home from an expedition get a Landcruiser!
Think you'll ind if you use a work computer for personal reasons, even if you use your own email account, they have the right to read your personal emails as they would have gone through the company server.
Before I semi retired and got rid of my big assets, that's who my company was set up, everything went through the server and I had access to it. I only every checked work emails and my employee's were allowed to do personal things if they had completed their work. All my employees were on contracts, which stipulated what they were allowed to do personally and one of those was, all personal phones had to be switched off during their shift and if they answered their phone,, they were fired on the spot. Never had a problem with my staff, for emergencies they could be reached through the business numbers.
yes it is legal , this forms part of the " use of communications " policy that companies have.
back when i was an employer I had full access to emails sent and recieved by all staff , basically by getting a blind drop copy sent to a folder on my desktop. I ignored every single one for years , as i had no need to monitor anything , all staff were doing a great job. I'd do a mass delete every week of hundreds of emails.
But then one day a new female co-ordinator was hired , and then things started happening like stuff going missing , meetings bombed out , staff complaints , accounts not being paid etc. I suspected the newbie right away and over a week started monitoring her emails and found the lazy skank was emailing her friends about all the work she wasnt actually doing.
I sacked her right away ( within the probation period ) and when she complained to the company owner I had all the evidence i needed. case closed. stupid bitch.
Had an incident years ago when working for the public service. They used to scan all emails for profanity believe it or not. My boss got a please explain letter regarding a personal email sent to someone in another department. His use of the term "breasts" triggered a monitor and his mail was opened and the complaint sent. He went ballistic as the mail was in fact him telling his brother in law about his sisters breast cancer and how serious it was. Now, we couldn't hear anything from the room where the security people and he had a "meeting", but the walls vibrated like a boom box in an automobile. The boss was not a big guy physically, but I don't think I've ever seen three people leave a room looking more terrified in my life...
The fact that there's a highway to hell and a stairway to heaven says a lot about the anticipated traffic flow.
If u are smart u can also use it to you're advantage by sending emails to friends stating how good you're boss is and how much you enjoy the job. Keep them short and sweet and add something like " got to go now I have heaps of work to do etc" If u are good at the job u might even hint that although u like the work U have been offered a similar position elsewhere for better remuneration or conditions !!
Last edited by RedXT; 09-01-16 at 09:27 AM.
sublib25 (09-01-16),vnboost (09-01-16),VroomVroom (10-01-16)
The email monitoring varies a lot depending on the size of the business. I used to do IT support for a number of small legal firms - in those, "anything goes", since some seem to think they are above the law in how they treat employees. Generally at least one of the partners would insist on full "domain admin" access to the entire network. We'd create a separate account for him (it was always a "he") to use when he needed God level access, but invariably, that account would be used for everything and left logged in on the desktop PC all day. Grrr. Generally they were too busy running the business to be bothered reading anyone else's email... unless like with "VroomVroom" above, something happened to make a manager want to start looking for evidence of trouble.
In larger organisations, like my current employer, it gets much more legalistic. New employees have a clause in the contract that they sign reminding them that work email and Internet access is monitored and records are retained for seven years. However, any request by a manager for access to an employee's email or internet use records goes through a security guy who imposes all sorts of checks and balances to protect the employee's privacy. This sometimes reaches a level of insanity when someone is away, but has left a critical document in their personal home drive. The user of the home drive is happy for their manager to access the home drive to get the document... but all sorts of "big organisation" bull sh.. gets in the way.
Some places search email and/or Internet logs for key words like "torrent", or for anything resembling a credit card number (CC numbers must never be sent by email or stored un-encrypted, so any organisation with PCI-DSS accreditation will be very jumpy about this). They'll also run regular reports to see who the top downloaders were for the last month and things like that. If your account stands out for lots of download activity and it's not work related... watch out.
Reschs advice re using a Gmail account is the best defense if you really need to send/receive personal email from a work computer.
Seymour Butts (09-01-16)
Put that sort of stuff forward and any decent employer would be getting rid of such a lying wanker, it would be easy to see their true reality by their work ethic and outcomes. Any business owner who has been successful for many years, has a good handle on employee antics and ploys. If someone in my employ was saying they have been offered a better paying position, I'd be telling them to take it as they no longer had a job.
alpha0ne (09-01-16),lsemmens (09-01-16),Seymour Butts (09-01-16)
The wife basically said I thought he was a dick and I don't like him.
But hey, everyone can be a bit of a dick.
Told her a while back that he's probably monitoring what she does.
Has a high staff turnover - now I know why - more concerned on a personel level as to work being done.
While this all sounds very draconian, the Employer/Supervisor is in an unpleasant situation having to monitor this traffic because if Employee A makes derogatory remarks,snide unpleasant comments about Employee B and its not picked up and dealt with, the Employer/Supervisor could be seen as negligent or even favouring the making of such comments and could face all sorts of penalties ranging from Monetary to bad publicity.
I stand unequivicably behind everything I say, I just dont ever remember saying it !!
Seymour Butts (09-01-16),sublib25 (09-01-16)
I'm in this position now, where it's part of my job to monitor the incoming and outgoing data traffic.
Whilst I have access to everything in the organisation I, like most other support positions, really don't have the time to read every piece of email.
I just generate activity reports based on word usage - if your language triggers one of my key words then I'll get a popup.
I get roughly 10 a day and I would be lucky to need to look at 5 of them and probably only intervene on perhaps one a month.
In an organisation of 400 users, I feel that's pretty good.
We have never fired anyone for inappropriate downloads etc. etc. however we do counsel offending and / or re offending users
In hindsight I should have posted my Facebook status as: "I've blown the head gasket on my 1997 XR3i" rather than "I've just buggered a 14 year old escort".
The police still haven't seen the funny side, my lap top's been confiscated and the wife has gone off to her mum's.
My daughter was sacked due to work related discussion with colleagues via Facebook when one ran to the boss with a copy of it.
Remember, anything you transmit thats typed has the ability to be read by someone else, whether legally or illegally. And reproduced.
Tell your wife not to talk work via any typed means. If she wants to talk, do it the old fashioned way , face to face via mouth. Realistically, she is lucky she still has a job. I sympathise, but thats the way it is these days.
I doubt your employees would be able to bring themselves to say anything like that anyway spook. LOL
I had a boss recently who was cracking down on phone use in the workshop. It was mainly aimed at the young blokes face paging all day. He came in one day and started going off his tits at me because I had my my smartphone out. I just showed him what I was looking at and explained that because the company had no easy access to vehicle schematics for modifications, I had them all on my phone for my own reference. After that all the young blokes were at me to give them copies of the schematics as well. LOL
Doubt those permanently employed in the company would look for another job, they have it to good and most have worked for us for decades. As it's the hospitality and entertainment industry, employees have no need to use their phones ever, whilst working. Not even the back room workers need their phones and it's stipulated in their contract, no phones at work. Much better to see them chatting to customers or each other, than head down with their stupid phones.
There's nothing worse than waiting to be served whilst some useless drop kick is looking at, or using their phone and you see that in just about every retail and hospitality business you enter. Walking down the street is another bizarre thing, phone stuck to their ears, or earphones fully cemented into their ears, no wonder they get run over and mugged.
Must be a pretty piss weak company if they have no access to work schematics, there are things called manuals, computers and workshop computer work stations, which even the smallest businesses use if they want to be competitive.
Several years ago now a worker was killed while doing a night shift cleaning routine.
According to the report on the incident, it was determined that the employee responsible for ensuring the work area was 'protected' after being instructed to do so, was found to have been using a Tablet or SMART phone and due to the distraction, didnt apply the needed 'Protection'.
The consequence was a dozen or so were allowed to commence the planned work resulting in one being killed.
I never heard or read what action if any was taken but even at best and nothing was done, imagine having that on your mind for the rest of your life.......
I stand unequivicably behind everything I say
To access the vehicle wiring diagrams at work, it was a case of trying to find someone who wasn't too "busy" to let you use their computer to access online schematics. The company had no schematics for the builds we did when I first got there, so I ended up producing a set for all of the work we did in my own time at home, and got them to print half a dozen sets and get them laminated. They lasted about 2 months before they were lost or damaged beyond use, so that's why I had my own on my phone. I even had copies of the PDFs from some of the manufactures on there as well and ADR's, but they were pretty difficult to read on a phone.
I find most things difficult to read on a phone, schematics would be a horror to read on one.
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