Ever since the Wall Street Journal and MSNBC ran a story in March on surveillance software, I’ve been deluged with e-mail asking if this is really true.
The answer, as I’ve been warning here for months, is, ‘Yes.’
More and more employers are investing in surveillance software that allows them monitor or eavesdrop on everything their employees type on their computers, be it e-mail, website surfing, or even word processing.
Everything includes every keystroke, every deletion, and every punctuation mark.
The most popular software out there is called “Investigator” and it only costs $99.
Spouses are buying it to monitor whether husbands or wives are having cybersex with someone else. Parents are buying it to monitor their children’s Internet activities. And employers, by the score, are installing it to see how employees are spending their time on the office computer.
So far, over 5,000 customers, including many major corporations, have bought the software and more and more companies are making similar applications.
The bottom line is that you must assume that everything you do on your work computer can be read by your boss.
