MONTREAL — Computers and the internet have revolutionized how we work. They have also brought new problems with them.
One of the biggest is pornography and how employers can limit what their workers watch on the Web.
It’s a problem you can probably find in any building, on any floor.
In fact, one Quebec company recently fired a director after an investigation found he spent about 6 hours a day, every day, downloading porn.
Private Investigator Claude Sarrazin conducted that investigation, and says it’s not that uncommon — one in three computers contains some sort of pornography: “70 per cent of the porn that is downloaded in North America is downloaded between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.”
It’s numbers like that, which lead to companies setting policies or limits on use of the net at work.
It’s a great tool, but there are plenty of distractions.
By some estimates, there are more than 4 million internet porn Web sites, about 12 per cent of net.
Add e-mail to that, too, and about one in 10 is porn-related.
Most people would assume that it’s mostly a problem for male workers, but the stats say otherwise, according to Saul Carliner from Concordia University.
“What we find when we do a search of a business is that about 30 per cent of people with porn on their computers are women,” he says.
Having a policy is one thing. Policing it is another.
Even as an employee, people still have some right to privacy.
But the biggest problem lies in what constitutes porn. What’s offensive to one person, may be innoccuous to another.
Helene Constantine is a technology lawyer and says that pornography has a very big grey area.
“We have nude images in the museum. Is that a bad thing? No. That’s why standards become so important.”
This may be a lot of things for companies to balance, but they may not have a choice.
One U.S. study estimates surfing at work costs their economy $250 billion dollars a year. Looking for pornography is the biggest chunk of that.
Lost hours at work aren’t the only problem. Downloading porn also slows down companies’ entire computer systems and opens them up to viruses and hackers.