Companies monitor Internet use

Anyone who steals, slacks off or just tends to a few personal matters at work should know one thing: Increasingly, the boss is watching.

Katy Nagel, 24, of Asheville learned that the hard way in November after the owners of a credit-repair agency she worked for read her personal e-mail, in which she had complained about their demeanor. She was fired promptly, despite having been a competent and otherwise committed worker, she said. She was shocked.

"I never signed anything saying it was OK to monitor my e-mail or Internet activity," Nagel said. "So I assumed it wasn't, which was a horrible assumption."

But increasingly, big institutions think that to protect people and assets, they must monitor their electronic realms. Nearly 80 percent of 1,400 U.S. executives polled said they have installed content-filtering or blocking software or instituted Web browsing policies, according to Robert Half Technology.

Few laws regulate electronic surveillance in the private sector, so often, it's done without employees' knowledge.

Indeed, quite an industry has grown around the increasing fear of what employees will say and do online. According to Forrester Research, the market for scanning software is increasing at about 30 percent annually and is well over half a billion dollars.

The latest monitoring software can scan and flag content on Web sites and in e-mail, instant messages, blog posts and offline documents. It can record keyboard strokes, spot uploads, downloads and changes to documents and flag when a worker copies a document to a USB stick to take home. Employee badges can even be embedded with radio frequency tracking devices, similar to those used to track livestock.

"Your digital bread crumbs are everywhere," said Steve Chase, executive vice president of Alphanumeric Systems, an IT services company in Raleigh. "Most people don't realize what they leave behind. Unless they're highly savvy, they don't cover their tracks."

Former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer made conspicuous payments to a prostitution ring that were flagged by data-mining software.

Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick left a trail of sexy text messages that exposed his affair and led to an obstruction of justice scandal involving a former aide.

Companies see a need

Until recently, companies were leery of monitoring software, because they didn't want to seem like Big Brother, said Adam Schran, CEO of Ascentive in Philadelphia, a maker of employee monitoring software, referring to the ominous overseer in George Orwell's "1984."

"But in the last year and a half, they just don't care, because there's a real frustration out there, and they're desperate to do whatever it takes to solve the problem."

The biggest buyers of monitoring technology are banks, health-care providers, food processors and companies with highly coveted intellectual property. But it applies to any large firm with a network and secrets to protect.

Part of the problem is the Web: It has grown so large and tangled that the risks go well beyond intentional harm.

Unwitting workers have been known to pass highly sensitive data over unsecured networks or take information home on a USB stick left unattended.

Other infractions, though more benign, are considered treacherous in the eyes of certain employers, Schran said. "Ten minutes after installing, one client said, 'Our top sales guy is on Monster.com, I gotta hang up,' " he said.

Employers are also concerned about productivity. That's why CBS Sports, which is streaming live NCAA playoffs on the Internet, includes a "boss" alert icon that when clicked automatically raises a spreadsheet.