Ok, this is actually a real situation in the company I work for. How legal is it for employer to be spying on personal conversation among staffs? By conversation, I mean through digital communication, either by email or messenger.

Although this does not involve myself, I wonder about the legality of such act by employer. Anyone has any thought on this?

Sorry if this is in the wrong forum.. feel free to move to correct one.

The company has the right to check on your emails because you are actually using your company's property such as the PC, mail server and email program.

If you check your personal email on your company's computer it is also perfectly fine for them to take or record all data.

Thats why I never login into any of my personal accounts when I'm at work (unless when I face problems and no choice but to login to forums to seek guidance ).

This post has been edited by Shinichi: Jul 11 2006, 12:35 AM

agree with the explanation but big company dont bother to spy on u

.... Unless they have reasons to. sometimes, just as a measure against industrial espionage, some companies do practice random screening of emails... and maybe even phone calls. u can verify this with risk analyst... actually its quite a standard guideline under certain school of corporate risk assessment, analysis and countermeasures.

but there are some cases where paranoia is the driving force.... well we are dealing with humans after all.

That's why we don't send personal emails in office, who knows they are spying us through the mainframe server.

they dont spy through mainframe server lah, they use proxy server to log all you internet activity. There are some way to bypass these proxy so they dont know what is you internet activity

This post has been edited by robertngo: Jul 11 2006, 08:32 AM

That's what my male colleague told me, so we tend not to log into our email and those male counterpart tends not to visit those XXX site.haha...so how to bypass it?

Its so called " Tunneling", heh

I once worked part time for a tele-marketing company...doing some kinda shit survey. They spy on your outgoing calls to see if you're doing a proper job. It might be wrong, but its done to see if any of "us" are slacking or not doing it properly etc.

Usually in the tele-marketing line, they record your calls so as to improve on their service and train their telemarketers in areas which they are weak in.

Not so, my friend who used to work at the IT department of a big company here in Malaysia handles the email screening program. They search all the company emails for special phrases, e.g. XXX, porn, smut, etc..etc..

In a way, it coincides with the spam filter as well.

Also if you noticed that you cannot send out certain type of files with certain extensions as well.

This post has been edited by Mavik: Jul 11 2006, 01:10 PM

i juz make sure everyone not sending confidential stuff out the company... i don't care if they recieve porn in mail... i sometimes dl those good stuffs from them too

the company have the right to know what are you doing with the company resources such as phone call, fax and emails... during working hour u can't use the company resources to do your personal things... so officially all the things ur doing suppost to be work for hte company... and the company have the right to peer on your work...

juz dun go and fap in the office or oneofficestand with other staffs is ok behavior for me

Still. don't u think the company should warn their staff first about this monitoring thingy..
Tell your staff what u can do and what u cant do. certain company does have high flexibility rate that make their staff think- oh! this is ok cos my company is so lenient, and this is nothing..

Thanks for all the reply! So it is not really an uncommon practice for company to snoop in on their worker.

Despite it all, I think a company should give the worker their own privacy. I don't the boss would like it either if someone were to snoop in on his mailbox.

In term of security, I would think having a locked down system would be enough. A worker should be able to feel comfortable, and not feel that they're constantly being watch. Kinda like having a security camera installed in the toilet.. well, that's an extreme example..

if your boss wanna sneak on u
he cant , coz it's against privacy

but if u got sign b4 one agreement where its written the company will have the rights to acceess to all your personal stuff .. then diff story

I don't check my mails at public computers, like in College, even forums I didn't log in, everything done at home.

Me too. I didn't check mail, do online banking..and other confidential stuff when I was using company computer. So, I brought along my laptop and online at the hotspot area such as Starbucks when its lunch break to surf my stuff.

U already did that... dint u read your employment contract/offer letter? furthermore its a standard clause in the company handbook. they dont need to inform or remind the staff anymore cos it was already given to u to acknowledge and signed before u were hired.

furthermore... there's no privacy in the office as long as its office property. they can walk in and use masterkey to open ur drawer and check its content, etc. the only privacy is they cannot do a body search nor go thru your purse/handbag/wallet etc.