Employees Beware of What You Are Doing on Your Company's Computer

The Muncie Star-Press publishes another warning of employees losing jobs over what they do online at work. I think that we all would know that a company owns its own computers and employees have no privacy rights on those computers. Then I read something like Companies monitoring employees and realize that the word either is not getting out or not being heard:

"Employers have ways to monitor the e-mail you send and the Web sites you visit on your computer at work.

And some have fired workers who have surfed inappropriate Web sites or written harassing or offensive e-mails.

'In summary, employees really have no expectation of privacy at all in the workplace,' said Manny Avramidis, senior vice president of global human resources for the American Management Association. 'In many ways, their privacy is checked at the door.'

More than half of employers fire workers for e-mail and Internet abuse, according to the AMA's 2007 Electronic Monitoring & Surveillance Survey. In the survey, 66 percent said they monitored Internet connections and 65 percent block Web sites at work, up from 27 percent in 2001.

Companies are concerned about workers spending too much time on the Web, decreasin"