Section 7.2 Personal Use Policy

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7.2 Personal Use Policy

At many companies, the availability of e-mail and Web access is considered a perk. If so, this should be stated. If it is forbidden, that should be stated. Similarly, what use employees may make of company computers should be plainly stated. Most companies do not allow employee use of their systems for "side businesses" but might not mind their use for personal finance.

Some companies forbid the acquisition and storage of pornography. When devising policy regarding this, do consider that most people of both sexes regularly view downloaded images of naked people and thus someone fired might have a claim for discrimination or demand that a witch-hunt be conducted. One person's art might mean something else to another. Consider, too, that lots of images will consume much disk space and bandwidth and that in some states if someone else sees an image or text not to their liking, a lawsuit may ensue.

Confused? Perhaps a policy stating that "personal data shall not consume excessive amounts of disk space and bandwidth (and SysAdmins will monitor this usage) and that care should be taken to prevent possibly offensive images from being seen by those who might be offended" would resolve this.

The use of

 du /home 

and

 find / ! -fstype proc '(' -iname '*.gif' \   -o -iname '*.jpg' \   -o -iname '*.jpeg' \   -o -iname '*.mpg' \   -o -iname '*.mpeg' ')' -ls \   | Mail -s 'Naughty bits' [e-mail] 

and the computationally expensive

 find / ! -fstype proc -type f \   ! -iname '*.gif' \   ! -iname '*.jpg' \   ! -iname '*.jpeg' \   ! -iname '*.mpg' \   ! -iname '*.mpeg' \   -print | xargs -n 50 file \   | grep -E ':.*image|:.*MPEG' \   | Mail -s 'Hidden naughty bits' \   [e-mail] 

will help detect excessive use, if allowed by law and organizational policy. Consider the consequences carefully before doing either of these find commands. Possibly having specified limits on resources and suggesting that those that exceed it quietly correct the situation would be the best policy. Certainly, disk quotas can be used to enforce users' use of disk space.

The reasons for policies prohibiting personal use are many. A major one is legal liability. This drives many of the policies against pornography, due to the fear that some other employee might see it and sue the company for harassment. In one case I witnessed in the late 1990s, someone printed out an S&M drawing of a scantily dressed woman with a whip but forgot to pick it up. Although quite a few employees reasonably could have been offended by this, one of the company's owners found the printout. He sent e-mail to everyone, stating that anyone getting caught doing this in the future would be terminated. A month later, at the same client, I found a printout of the salary of everyone in the company that someone in Human Resources had forgotten to pick up. Which was the worse offense?

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