First let me state that I am not an attorney, so this should not be taken as legal advice. In the business arena my experience has been it is lawful to install whatever one wants on equipment providing the company owns it, with the only acceptable provision being that it may not invade personal privacy. Video cameras, for example, can be installed to monitor employees but are not permissable in bathrooms, or other places where people have a "reasonable expectation of privacy". Some companies/organizations explicitly state in their policy manuals that such monitoring/recording may be done by the company. I'm sure there are those that will disagree with me that in Missouri we monitored (in another life of mine) and recorded, without any previous warning, calls made by the sales department. Our counsel approved this because no employee has any reasonable expectation of privacy while using a phone system and phone lines owned by the company. From your Email I see you are with a government agency. I would hope they have published policies on installing and using spyware on employees, but I certainly don't know what's permissable and what's not in Federal, State and local government operations. While I personally find what you said they did below offensive, in the private business world I see this alot and it's based on the premise that the employee is using a company owned computer to perform his/her job functions on company time and getting paid for it. I would consider taking the facts and the hard evidence, up the chain-of-command (in writing of course) and either it will be stopped and someone gets in trouble, or, you will get told it's policy. Either way you force the issue to get resolved not just for your benefit but for everyone else who works there. Regards, G. Chatten FCS -----Original Message----- From: owner-crime@private [mailto:owner-crime@private]On Behalf Of Rob Magee Sent: Friday, April 30, 2004 1:36 PM To: crime@private Subject: CRIME Surreptitious software Yesterday, the network team botched a silent install of Resource Monitor (resourcemonitor.com) on my computer when I logged in. I noticed it when I had to reboot after the install conflicted with MS's handwriting and speech module for Office and crashed. This software is aimed at monitoring staff application use, but goes a step further by adding screenshot capture and keylogging. My question is, is it legal to have silently installed keylogging software, even though that feature may not be enabled? My understanding is that keylogging is the digital equivalent of wiretapping, but I need some clarification. Thanks all. You can respond to me at: Rob Magee Outreach Helpdesk Team Oregon Department of Education (503) 378-3600 ext. 4495 robmagee100@private <mailto:robmagee100@private>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Apr 30 2004 - 13:16:16 PDT