Where am I?"

"In the Village."

"What do you want?"

"Information."

"Whose side are you on?"

"That would be telling…. We want information. Information! INFORMATION!"

"You won't get it."

"By hook or by crook, we will."

I might make an application called Rover to replace the human email scanners, or perhaps to serve up the dismissal notices, and provide guidelines for escorting off the premises :).

Teleperformance USA (where I am, formerly Calltech Communications), a call center outsourcing partner, pays people to be "Floor Control", the primary task of which is to walk up and down the call center isles to make sure no one is accessing non-work websites.

"Who are you"

"I'm number two"

"Who is number one"

"You are Number six" (or is it: "YOU are, Number six")

"I am not a number......."

The difference of a comma is quite a lot. Some of us really ARE in control of our lives, much as others don't want that to be true!

American( and British) companies encourage staff to rat on their colleagues for almost any transgressions of company policies or political correctness policies. The world is now an unhealthy mixture of Orwellian Big Brother and the nazi's rat on your parents/brother/sister etc kind of thinking. you have either got to be a model worker (with a brown nose) or not give a rat's arse.

I worked for a telecommunications company in the UK for 5 years. We produced software that logged the call details of every phone call coming into and out of a company's telephone switch. No they don't record the phone call itself, it's a lot more boring than that, and a lot more useful if you want to sack someone.

Their phone system, they can do as they wish as long as it's not actually listening in on the call.

There were plenty of good reasons for having the software - Police forces would keep track of response times to 999 calls, Hotels would charge customers, RAF and Army would keep track of phone card use, businesses would keep track of their customer support response times.

But they'd also keep track of the calls you made, to whom, how often and whether that could be considered abuse. They would keep track of when employees ignored phone calls, and which extensions ignored them, and in which order. I ran the software myself and could tell if the helpdesk people I managed bumped the calls of difficult customers to the next person in line, and then the next person and so on until someone finally answered.

Believe me when I say we dealt with the largest employers in the country - and if we had offered them the ability to track web use or read outgoing email, I doubt a single one of them would have turned it down. At least not unless it was proven illegal. I recall the court cases involving tracking the internet use of local authority computers, and all of them have said the employee has no expectation or right to privacy when using publicly funded computers. I doubt they'd rule any differently for private business. You don't own the computer you use, the company does, and therefore it has the right to know what and how it's been used by its employees. If you think using IM or blogs are in the best interests of your company, I'd make sure someone in management not only agrees, but writes and signs something to that effect. Unfortunately it's unlikely, because not most management fail to see how the massive advantages these tools can give.

The difference of the comma is a red herring or a point of reflection.

It is your association of your idea with what being number 1 means. Perhaps the Dante's hell is your making, but how does that make you free?

Is 0 better than 1, or -6 better than 1, how about 7 is that better than 1?

The number 1 is still a number, not a free man :)

"...all of them have said the employee has no expectation or right to privacy when using publicly funded computers"

An "expectation" doesn't protect the employer from the liability from intercepting and retaining communications of absolute privilege. One day we'll see an employer caught with intercepts of employee's e-mails with their doctor about an injury suffered at work or a lawyer about some breach of industrial law and the wheel will turn.

Interesting to hear that there are people reading corporate e-mails. They'll make useful witnesses even after the corporate e-mail retention policy has deleted the primary evidence. I'm hoping those companies remember to make those e-mail readers available during discovery :-)

I can understand a comanies point of view, you should be working while uing our quipment in our office while were paying you. But, unless our a habitual offender of constantly surfing and not working, or if your emailing the "secret plans" to the competition, I have a problem with anyone being fired.

Sad but true... some of us actually do all our duties etc... then have time to do other things. Lucky for me the information commissioner or whatever the local one is ruled that employees receive expectation of privacy. Only if there is suspected abuse(A) or suspicion of a crime(B) can they do anything and even then

A) it is suggested the employee be present

but if there is a folder marked PERSONAL in someones mailbox it should not be touched

B) only a police investigator can do so

Infact there was recently a high profile(government) case involving something like this :)

The people responsible already got fined...

So let them go home after the 8 hour shifts.

They can then have time to USE their home internet connection.