Detecting Porn Tool for the Workplace

(CNET) Pornography in the workplace can pose a serious problem for employers because a significant amount of material is downloaded by employees during business hours.

The viewing of porn at work can result in lost time, creativity, productivity, and employer profitability. More importantly, it can help create a hostile work environment and can be considered sexual harassment, in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Naturally, corporations want to avoid the potentially serious legal consequences and protect their bottom line.

On Sunday, Orem, Utah-based forensic-software maker Paraben plans to introduce a unique piece of enterprise software developed to detect and analyze images on workplace networks and computers for suspect content. The system looks for a number of sophisticated parameters and grades images at three levels, based upon their correlation with criteria that have been programmed into the system.

The software, according to CEO Amber Schroeder, will also aid in the development of evidence for internal or criminal investigations in such cases. It's expected to cost about $17,000 for 500 computers.

I interviewed Schroeder last week, during the Techno Forensics seminar at the headquarters of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), near Washington D.C. From personal experience, I can attest to the difficulty in analyzing large hard drives. Searching terabytes of data is incredibly time-consuming and difficult, so this software should provide a welcome tool for administrators and investigators.

Schroeder told me that the program cannot discriminate between child and adult pornography, but it is extremely effective at rapidly identifying suspect images, either online or offline. The system is capable of providing an effective real-time monitor, as images are downloaded to individual workstations, and can definitely aid in shielding employers from extremely costly lawsuits.

Even more importantly, such a program can help protect employees from the kind of invidious and offensive conduct that has been ruled as actionable by the courts, she said.

While the Paraben software has been designed for the corporate environment, it isn't prepared to examine other problem areas: cell phones, PDAs, and any other device that provides access to the Internet.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/...n4587725.shtml

so my friend tipped me off to this new device.

CNET did a story about a new toy for the corporate scum that will tell the managment teams when their employees are looking at porn. All I have to say is that if your employee has that kind of time on their hands and somehow you cant tell as a manager...why do either of you still have a job...but seriously...what do you all think, is it going to hinder business?

Kisses

You'd better watch out Dusty, dont want you looking at porn while you are supposed to be working LOL

Regards,

Lee

i always look at porn while i'm working ;)

in all seriousness, i know guys who get paid over $100,000 a year and spend at least 2 hours a day surfing porn. and Dusty, they DON'T have the spare time to do it - they do it while they both have work to do and are getting paid to do it. and since they tend to be higher end management, no one is sitting over their shoulder. still, there should be better ways.

nevertheless, i am 100% sure this program will cause programs. a woman will send her husband a pic of their baby wearing only a diaper or a guy will send his friend a pic of him posing at a bodybuilding contest or someone will send a pic of him and some buddies at the beach in bathing suits and the pics will be seen as scantily clothed and set off alerts.

A company I used to consult for had SurfControl, which was a pretty good system that monitored internet usage and, depending on how it was set, could block sites either by category (sports, news, humor, movie, porn, etc) or through individually installed blocks.

I was responsible for implementing it when we got it, and I found it to be pretty flexible and pretty reasonable... you could turn off any or all the filters during lunch hours, for example, or before or after work... and once people knew that management was getting a report of who was visiting sites that were outside of our guidelines for work-related browsing, the Internet usage dropped dramatically and actually we were able to delay adding more bandwidth to our Internet connection. :)

More recently, I had to block Myspace from one of our recent employee's computers because he was simply incapable of not checking his myspace (and everyone elses) every 15 minutes, in spite of multiple warnings. Ultimately, he ended up not working out because he was just too unfocused in general, but the block did help his productivity.

I think that, used wisely, this sort of filtration can be helpful to an employer, both in terms of increasing productivity and in reducing risk of sexual harassment claims and so forth. But it all depends on whether it's used reasonably and responsibly, or as a witch-hunt. Considering it's coming out of a company in Utah, they would probalby like to stamp out all porn and marginally questionable content from the earth, so I'm not sure that I necessarily support this company... but the idea itself isn't really a bad one.