Is Your Main Work Role Spying On Everyone Else’s Browser History ?

4 responses to “Is Your Main Work Role Spying On Everyone Else’s Browser History ?”

1. 

   steve f.

   September 2, 2013

   One of my first jobs in the very early days of the net was to monitor the proxy server logs for staff breaching the internet access policy of a large public company by looking at naughty things. My first day on the job I spied leatherman.com in the logs and I thought ‘ah ha, I’ve caught you looking at kinky gay porn’, turned out they were just looking for a pair of folding pliers with a knife……

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2. 

   grayda

   September 2, 2013

   As an IT guy working at a school, students are stunned by the fact that at the end of the day, I DON’T just crawl under the desk and sleep, that I’m actually married and have a life outside of the school.

   Once they get over that shock, my role falls into three distinct categories:

   * Playing games (nobody has seen me do it, but surely IT isn’t a full time job? Computers just look after themselves, right?)
   * Sitting in front of a screen watching pages of logs whizz past, looking for big red warnings such as “WARNING: Student playing CoD in Room 20 on a HP laptop” and
   * Staring at symbols all day (no, really. A girl told me “It must be boring staring at symbols all day”. I think she’d watch too much of The Matrix)

   But in all seriousness, I used to duck in to the logs every now and again. Mostly at teacher’s request, but sometimes to work out who had been browsing what. YouTube was blocked here, so looking at the logs let me know who was getting around the blocks.

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   1. 

      unknown_101

      September 3, 2013

      I think all students think staff at schools stay there. (teachers, admin and IT)

      And with the Matrix thing, At least your last name is not Anderson…. yes I get it your quoting a movie that came out 10 years ago… never heard that one before (Work in IT too)

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3. 

   458italia

   September 2, 2013

   In my experience it is not the IT dudes who want to police the company internet use.
   It is the Internal Auditors – who usually self appoint themselves as the corporate Gestapo.
   Hilarious because they often don’t know how to efficiently monitor the logs and waste huge amounts of time on this task.
   One large organisation I contracted for had a much better idea.
   The just made the live log of internet sites available to everyone. Staff were clearly informed that anyone else in the organisation could see at any time which websites you were looking at.
   Great way to curb inappropriate and non-work related web surfing.

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