Employee Use of the Internet and Acceptable Use Policies in the Academic Workplace: Controlling Abuse while Creating Culture.

The use of the Internet has grown substantially, especially since the late 1990s. Businesses are relying increasingly on the Internet and intranet as tools to promote productivity. Use of the Internet has several implications for institutions of higher education. Some of the issues institutions are faced with include legal liability for defamatory postings and sexually explicit materials, monitoring versus privacy, motivations to abuse Internet privileges, and use of the Internet to create a corporate culture. Institutions of higher education need to consider how the Internet is being used and how it should be used when acceptable use policies are being formulated. The purpose of this quantitative study was to gain an understanding of perceptions about acceptable use of the Internet by employees at work, attitudes about personal use of the Internet during working hours, and the knowledge and effectiveness of an acceptable use policy within the context of institutions of higher education. The data gathered could be used as a foundation for an effective, progressive acceptable use policy for higher education. The data for the research were gathered from December, 2005 through January of 2006. Six 4-year institutions were surveyed. The study revealed older employees responded that the use of the Internet at work as not acceptable, while younger employees, faculty members and respondents with more Internet experience or more hours of overtime indicated that personal use was acceptable. The study identified significant differences in self-reported use of the Internet, both at home and at work. Additionally, a general lack of knowledge existed regarding an institutional Internet acceptable use policy. The results of the study were applicable to the formulation of policy for institutions of higher education

Internet Privacy: At Home and At Work

This paper is a tutorial on Internet privacy. The objective of the tutorial is to inform users of the Internet how and why their use of the Internet can be monitored. The focus of the tutorial is Internet privacy at home and in the work place. The tutorial contains three major sections: Technical Background, Privacy At Home and Privacy At Work. The At Home section is concerned with personal privacy infringement. This section details who would be interested in personal privacy infringement, for what purpose, and how they would accomplish it. The At Home section also discusses techniques on how to avoid privacy infringement. The At Work section is concerned with employee surveillance. Topics discussed include who would be interested in this surveillance, for what purpose, and how this surveillance would be carried out. The At Work section also discusses the concept of an Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) Both of these sections require a bit of technical expertise to understand how Internet activity can be monitored. The Technical Background section and the Appendix review the client/server paradigm of web computing, the important details of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and presents an overview of Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). These concepts are necessary to understand how Internet activity can be monitored

Internet Research and Appropriate Content: Keeping Students Safe on the Internet

Since the advent of the Internet, educators have struggled with the problem of utilizing its research potential while protecting students from viewing inappropriate content such as pornography, illegal substances and hate-oriented websites. Schools need to face this challenge with a plan for how to best protect children from offensive material while allowing quality research opportunities. This study uses research from experts in the field and a survey of 156 teachers to determine the best way to maximize Internet research and protect children from offensive material online. This study is the first to survey teachers for their opinions on Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs), Internet filters and local control of Internet technology. Most of the teachers surveyed are overall pleased with their school’s current efforts to protect kids from inappropriate material on the Internet. AUPs alone are not good deterrents to searching for offensive material. Internet filters, while controversial, do offer a wall of protection from this material. Teachers overall would like their schools to have more control over the filtering devices. The hope is that this information can be used to help school districts implement or alter policy to better protect kids while offering quality research opportunities

'E' for exposed? Email and privacy issues

In March 1996, American Libraries featured a piece about a librarian at the University of California/Irvine whose supervisor intercepted her e-mail while she was absent on medical leave. As a result of this, UC's Office for Academic Computing began a review of e-mail privacy on the nine-campus system. This article and UC's reaction prompted my research into this topic

Internet Filters: A Public Policy Report (Second edition; fully revised and updated)

No sooner was the Internet upon us than anxiety arose over the ease of accessing pornography and other controversial content. In response, entrepreneurs soon developed filtering products. By the end of the decade, a new industry had emerged to create and market Internet filters....Yet filters were highly imprecise from the beginning. The sheer size of the Internet meant that identifying potentially offensive content had to be done mechanically, by matching "key" words and phrases; hence, the blocking of Web sites for "Middlesex County," or words such as "magna cum laude". Internet filters are crude and error-prone because they categorize expression without regard to its context, meaning, and value. Yet these sweeping censorship tools are now widely used in companies, homes, schools, and libraries. Internet filters remain a pressing public policy issue to all those concerned about free expression, education, culture, and democracy. This fully revised and updated report surveys tests and studies of Internet filtering products from the mid-1990s through 2006. It provides an essential resource for the ongoing debate