Re: Proof of personal Internet Usage

On Wed, 10 Oct 2007, Big Dave wrote:

IT have told her departmental head that she has gone over the 17 hours
a month limit for the internet.

Is this 17 hours limit per month made public knowledge? How are
employees supposed to track it? Are there any time restrictions on this
usage, eg is lunch hour considered? Can they demonstrate how they are
certain that she has exceeded this limit? Are there any warnings given
if an employee is nearing their limit?

Now her boss has received a printout of the times she was on the
internet and a printout of all the sites that she visited. The
majority of the sites are links to images either in emails, images
linked from one site to another or pop-ups.

From this description these will almost certainly be a printout of proxy
logs, filtered on her username. These will show a line for every web
page, every little button graphic, menu bar, and so on. Going to a
website can easily produce 100+ log entries over several seconds in some
cases.

Now there are about a dozen that she visits in her own time and about
the same she uses for research as part of her job.

It might be an idea for her to detail each one and explain when she
might visit these sites.

No one can tell her what time she visited these sites so they have
just assumed that she spent the majority of time on the personal ones?

If she goes to a page then the logs will show it and all its contents.
If she later goes to another page, the logs will then show that and all
its contents. Someone who does not know how to read the logs might then
assume that she spent the time in between reading the first site.

If this is how the 17+ hours has been arrived at, it is a big mistake.
If I visit news.bbc.co.uk at 1305 hours there will be a raft of entries
in the logs for it. If I then visit www.theregister.co.uk at 1330 there
will be another raft of entries for that. It is not possible to
determine how long I spent 'on' the BBC site. If someone said that I
was on it for 25 minutes before changing sites, that would be a complete
misunderstanding.

One can get an idea of usage by looking at the times of each 'block' of
entries and seeing how these blocks progress. It's time-consuming and
still doesn't give an exact explanation of usage, merely an indication.

I used to manage the main server for the place I worked at and saw this
kind of activity all the time. We were running squid, a popular web
proxy, and everything was logged against username.

Unless they can prove that the majority of the time spent on the
internet WAS on the personal sites have they got a case against her?

That probably depends on her contract of employment and any legislation
around personal usage (and hopefully a large dose of commonsense from
the employers). The question is HOW they prove it and whether it's had
any negative effect on her performance.

If it's going to potentially affect her career she should probably get
some proper representation as well as someone technical who understands
exactly what is on this printout.

--
Chris
.