You've got mail, but who else reads it?

E-mail filtering is controversial, but prevalent

photo: Andre Pichette

Andrew Quinn

Andrew Quinn was not digging for dirt when he installed a piece of software on the computer system of Ritvik Toys a few weeks ago. He was trying to discover why the new Internet capacity was being overwhelmed so quickly.

He expected to find it was employees browsing on the Internet clogging things up. But he was floored to discover it was a veritable flood of e-mails and jokes that was jamming up Ritvik's system.

"We were astonished to find out it was just the volume of e-mail", said Mr. Quinn, the information systems manager for the Montreal-area toymaker. "We were averaging about 2,000 e-mails a day going in and out -- and we have just over 200 users. We discovered 30% to 40% of that was personal."

In many senses, Ritvik Toys is much like any other office in today's wired workplace.

Data released yesterday by Neilson//NetRatings found people use the Internet in record numbers, spending on average twice as much time online at work as surfers do at home. E-mail may have replaced the water cooler as employees' venue of choice when it comes to gossiping, griping, or joking.

"It's just the sheer volume", complained Mr. Quinn. "It's all these video files that people send back and forth. People get a joke, and they copy it to 10 other people. The volume became the real issue."

The solution was SuperScout, software that generates bar charts showing the 10 people at Ritvik who send the most e-mails, the 10 who receive the most, and the 10 who send the biggest files -- a sign of attachments.

"We are not interested in looking at people's personal e-mail, even though we could", he said. "We just view the heading. It's not that we object to personal e-mail, it's just that bandwidth is a limited resource."

But there are companies that are vitally interested in seeing the contents of employee messages, and for legitimate reasons ranging from protecting trade secrets to warding off potential harassment suits.

They use filtering programs, which pick up messages containing selected "hot words" and stream them for viewing by human eyes.

Michael Geist, a University of Ottawa law professor, says Canadian courts have indicated through rulings that monitoring employee messages is fair game, as long as they are warned in advance.

"But I am quite troubled by the trend in that regard", said Mr. Geist, who specializes in Internet law. "You wouldn't see employers monitoring employee phone calls or discussions in the company cafeteria. Yet because they have the capability of doing so in the electronic environment,they are doing so.

"In many regards, the ability to snoop electronically is far greater than it ever was with other methods of communication that employees have."

But good old-fashioned human ingenuity can still outwit a computer. One lawyer at a large Bay Street firm has found a way to subvert the program designed to catch profanity such as the f-word. The lawyer routinely substitutes medically accurate but linguistically questionable synonyms such "intercoursing".

Mr. Geist and other experts say as Internet and e-mail use mushrooms, so does corporate surveillance.

Bloomberg News, one of North America's leading financial news corporations, routinely monitors its employees' electronic communications with a filtering program. Bloomberg also recently put new curbs on Internet use, shutting down access to online trading sites and chat rooms as well as to all outside e-mail systems.

"You should make arrangements to forward your e-mail to your Bloomberg.net address if you wish to retrieve during business hours", staff were told in a memo that was quickly posted on the Internet.

Employees were reminded that "the Company monitors employees' computer use and employees who use Company equipment to access the Internet for non-business use can be subject to disciplinary action up to and including termination (unfortunately this has already happened), and/or legal action."

Chris Taylor, a Bloomberg spokeswoman, said the electronic restrictions "are something that is necessary in today's work environment".

Ms. Taylor said eliminating profanity from employee e-mails is necessary because computer screens can be seen by everyone in the company's open newsrooms, and swear words could be offensive to some people. She said employees should not be trading stock, or talking on chat rooms, on company time.

But one posting on a chat room, a site now banned on Bloomberg computers, by someone claiming to be a staffer, said: "This is more than simply making sure employees don't waste time -- this is a policy that keeps employees scared, uncomfortable, and full of loathing for the zookeeper that feeds ya."

David Jones, who is co-founder of Electronic Frontier Canada, an online civil rights organization, said companies have the right to keep tabs on how employees spend company time, as long as the monitoring policies are public.

"Monitoring is not always for the sake of nosiness", said Mr. Jones. "It can be for the sake of information gathering, for an effective way to run the business.

"People would not think it unreasonable to look at long-distance telephone bills and fax bills. People want to be able to do the same kind of analysis for e-mail."