Is online porn ruining your firm's productivity?
By Benny Thomas   |   Thursday, 03 June 2010, 17:41 IST
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Is online porn ruining your firm's productivity?
Bangalore: Did you know that a recent report alleged that the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) employees in the U.S. were browsing porn sites at a time when the country was sinking into its worst financial crisis in more than 70 years. Today, not many companies consider it as a priority to monitor its employees' internet activity, though there are written policies in place. Another reason is that there are several loopholes in cyber laws that can easily be manipulated by the users to spread pornography through the web, which is considered illegal in many countries including India. While this problem may exist in any type of organization, smaller firms are more vulnerable than the big guys, according to Nitin Agarwal, Director of Wildnet Technologies, a web development firm that also offers cyber law services. "In big companies there are several checks that are done on the employees to prevent them from viewing porn, but smaller firms cannot afford it," says Agarwal. In major companies like Wipro, if the employee is found peeping into pornographic sites online, they may also get dismissed as per the code of ethics followed by the IT major, which every employee has to sign in the joining letter itself. However, this may not be the case in every other company, especially non-technology firms in other verticals like manufacturing, retail and others. In many companies, employees also share pornographic materials by saving it in a common folder on the network, which everyone can access. While it can be pointed that many managers have failed to ensure that their employees adhere to the company policies on these issues, the reality shows the darker side of things. "Pornographic viewing mostly happens with senior staff members, whose content filtering is disabled or relaxed because of the position they hold," says Satish Kumar, IT Manager at an UK based firm that offers human resources software solutions. He feels that the smaller firms need to give more freedom to their employees; hence there are more chances of them misusing it. Though, some feel that the cyber laws are not very effective, there are others who feel that they are well equipped to tackle current business needs and can penalize companies if there is a breach. "The company may also be held liable if an employee sends/forwards material which can be considered pornographic to his friends, colleagues or acquaintances," says Debasis Nayak, Director, Asian School of Cyber Laws. As per a 2008 amendment of Section 67 of the Information Technology Act, 2000, "Whoever publishes or transmits or causes to be published or transmitted in electronic form" any material "which is lascivious or appeals to prurient interest" or "contains sexually explicit act or conduct" is liable to be penalized. Nayak feels that if the companies become more cautious, they can overcome this issue. "The companies should have an appropriately drafted policy prohibiting such activity, implement strict controls including software to monitor suspicious activity and most importantly, enforce the measures mentioned in the policy if an employee is found guilty," says Nayak. According to Kumar, a proper content filtering solution would also do the trick and nowadays even cheap firewalls have a basic content filtering option with detailed log analysis. With pornographic viewing emerging as a serious threat to the productivity of the companies, apart from facing the consequences that the law demands, it is high time they take this up as a key issue and try to overcome it.

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