God help us....

An NOP New Media survey conducted in Britain shows that a majority of IT
personnel, despite their direct relationship with corporate e-mail
policy, contribute to corporate e-mail abuse.

The August 14 study, in which 100 IT professionals from each of the UK's
seven largest employment sectors (accounting services, civil services,
financial services, legal services, retail, manufacturing and IT) were
surveyed, shows 69 percent of IT staff admitting to falling victim to
the temptations of opening questionable or outright inappropriate e-mail
content. A further 42 percent let it be known that they actively
distribute such content to friends, and colleagues who they feel will
appreciate it.

In the UK and in many other places, an email is legally tantamount to a
company's letterhead, thus making the employer liable for whatever
employees circulate or send-out. 66 percent of those surveyed
acknowledge knowing this fact, yet being aware of this does not convince
them to apply the brakes.

The business community faces a real challenge getting IT to understand
and to stick to corporate e-mail policy. The first step is for the HR
department to devise an Acceptable Use Policy, communicating to all
employees as to what constitutes appropriate and inappropriate e-mail
use. The next step is to involve the IT department in looking at ways in
which sophisticated filtering technologies can minimize the amount of
harmful and unnecessary Internet content and to help enforce the
company's policy.

To check out the survey please visit:
http://www.surfcontrol.com/go/emailethics2

 

Being a citizen of the US of A, English is my second language, so sometimes the subleties of the English eludes me.
I do not understand, what is " questionable or outright inappropriate e-mail content"? Is this concerning a lack of moral fibre or a security issue?
Based on the title of this post, evidently this is something that is upsetting to you, but I see nothing I would not expect to see, unless I am totally missing the point.
I would fully expect employees to be concerned about company policy only to the extent that they would not want to get caught violating it.
My wife says I have become too jaded, perhaps she is right.

 

English is not my own language too.

Several years ago i had some discussion with one of the directors of one of the larger companies here, about security and emails.
For our laws it is not permitted to scan personal email in any ways, but you can put some settings so no images, attachments, html and such can enter the host.
His example was somebody sent an email with an image, everybody standing around the screen, printed out, forwarded to many others in- and outside the company, and he calculated if everybody was involved with that one image and looking two minutes and two minutes talking and the bandwidth of sending it and printing that one image cost the company of some 1700 people an enormous financial loss of several thousands of guilders and many man hours work. So that is why he named such activities abusive, even if it would just be an innocent merry christmas card, not to mention "worse" things ))
And he did not talk about risks of infections yet.
So this director was not interested to hear about our privacy laws and such. Not quite sure if there are more possibilities to set rules for private use of emails.
For snailmail it also is not allowed to use in fact paper and envelopes and time of the employer nor his stamps, but that is easy to control. Although emails as well with some extra rule setting on the mail servers.
In his opinion everything not having to do with the business is impropriate.

 

I understand. If snail mail was like e-mail, every letter would be a postcard! Free for all to view. Tinribs point is that the corporate IT personnel do not seem to realize that they are invading the privacy of the people who sent the e-mails. If those same people were busy opening Her Majesty's Post, heads would roll! I would suggest that more concerned citizens need to lobby their governments to extend Postal Laws to e-mail and electronic messaging! Until such measures are (or are not) established e-mailers need to either encrypt their messages or be more aware that anyone can read what they send!

 

And what if it was actually a convential (not email) card wishing Happy New Year?
How much time is spend every year to send and receive them? Would that director also be concerned about that?
I think that director should think twice.
Or maybe he has a controling person with stopwatch behind everyone to see how much time everyone is spending on which issue.....

 

Some very interesting replies here.
I'm waiting for Tinribs answer to this mystery.

 

Ok root

here is the senerio...

Have somebody try add slang here at Wilders and you will see some no nos
Like the ***** pussycat ones I saw yesterday...

Course is we add spaces its all irrelavent...

P U S S Y K I T T Y

 

Maybe it is just me or where I live but I wouldn't work for anyone who read my emails or made an issue over company time crafting them. I'd rather look for a job where the employees enjoy mutual respect with the management.

I will add that my place in companies means I can read management emails if I wished to (but don't) since I usually had the responsibility of the mail server NOBODY reads my mail lol.

PS Controler, save that stuff for the video game forums.

 

i appreciate the employer's need to decrease inapproprate use of email, especially now with the virus's that can be so easily spread through the network, but to actually read an individual's email, i would want to know that that was being done and the reason for it.

we have had the freedom of using the net for a quite awhile now, and with a very simple policy in place as the employer see's the employees as adults who do not need baby-sitting. But just this past month, a new policy has come down that internet will now be monitored and certain access is forbidden, eg: hotmail, inappropriate sites, etc., and all correspondence recorded and stored, which has really always been the case, just now though, officially. At least they have told the employee's what will be happening, how, and why....but they've stressed there is a need to learn and grow with the internet, and in order to keep individual access for the employee's available, not everything will be forbidden, but that we would know since we would not be allowed to access certain sites. Wilder's is not forbidden.

but i still would not post or type out a private email at work.

 

My point of the post is similar to the rules where I work (NTL)
We were warned recently because emails being sent around were getting silly,stupid pictures of which some were humorous but some a bit on the sick side.
These emails even started getting into the 'joke program' realm, I saw in this post a possible security risk, if IT pro's are opening and running any old attachment,relying on the company av to pick up,this is dangerous and they should know better.
Another thing is these jokey emails were also being sent outside the company to others including friends in major companies we deal with,imagine a new in the wild virus being spread this way via a jokey program,looks bad for any company and its policies.

 

Then they are not IT pros. No competent IT person would do this. It isn't a matter of email viruses, any IT person capable of this should be fired because they are a fool. Who wants a company's system being run but such a person? Would this person not slack on data backup too?