Careful: Employee E-Mails, IMs **Must Be Tracked** (New Federal Rule)

Local6.com ^ | December 1, 2006 | no author cited

[Cementjungle]

IMs are just another way for people not to work.

Well, phones can have the same result. What ever happened to the concept of judging someone's job performance based on their... job performance?

[GregoryFul]

I see the prohibition of e-mail in corporate environs. And no more USB ports on our computers!

Here we have the government insisting that it has the (ungranted, actually prohibited) right to eavesdrop on assumed private conversation in a corporate environment, and the corporation has a duty to collect and present such as probative evidence. It is like insisting on recovering a person's thoughts, rather than his decisions, actions and behaviors, to determine guilt or innocence of some infraction.

Suppose some employer has a crazy employee who wants to off the US president, and expresses such in an e-mail. Is the company guilty in conspiracy to assassinate the president?

This is an absurd usurpation of the 4th.

[Psycho_Bunny]

I've never seen IMs be anything but disruptive, but I've never worked in a company that had divisions spread around throughout different cities.  It's interesting that your company has a practical use for them.

When I worked in IT at Bank of America, we had an IMing system set up and reading the logs for that system was basically just reading sex talk.....and jokes and gossip.

But most of the working divisions there were centralized within themselves.

[Psycho_Bunny]

Well, phones can have the same result. What ever happened to the concept of judging someone's job performance based on their... job performance?

Phones aren't the same....in a normal office the persons next to you hear the phone conversations so fewer people waste time on the phone.  No one hears you IMing.....as far as your co-workers know, someone IMing could just as well be working.

And it's really not all about job performance.  Although, that's part of the problem.

 

[proxy_user]

The most amusing use of IM is private conversations during large, official phone conferences.

A: That guy must not know the architecure.
B: He's just a manager, he doesn't understand the technology he supports.
A: You'd think his people would tell him.
B; He doesn't listen.
A: Well, should be explain why it won't work?
B: No, just let him spout off. We'll just go ahead and do it the right way. He'll never know....