Even the smallest amount of unauthorized internet web-use by company employees cost American employers hundreds-of-thousands or even millions of dollars in annual productivity loss.

In just the past 10 minutes I have already received 5 text messages (two personal), 3 cell phone calls and an old high school contact from MySpace, and this is only the fourth paragraph of my article!

I'm my own boss so, it's my productivity loss. Some articles take me longer to write than do others. But your boss probably feels very different when it comes to what you do online while at work. In fact the problem affects more than your employer's productivity losses. Companies have discovered that employees can leak confidential company information using removable media like USB flash drives, CDs, and DVDs. So is it right for your employer to track your electronic and online activities while you work?

Take a close look at your worker's handbook or your employee contract. You will probably find a reference stating that you acknowledge all activities you conduct in the workplace are considered to be public information made available to your employer and possibly others. In fact a supervisor of the average sized company in America can have access to reports showing which employees chat or use anonymous email services like Hotmail and Gmail. They know which of their employees are spending the most time surfing on the internet, and which sites they visit. They have the power to instantly review screenshots of any email an employee opens on any company computer. Yes, they can even view photo and video attachments.

So, if your boss always knows when you arrive to work late or leave early; or who takes long lunch breaks chances are they utilize electronic "Monitoring Software" of some type on their computer systems.

SpectorSoft Corporation of Vero Beach Florida provides such software for employers and now parents who are concerned about the "dark side of the internet". 

A recent episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show featured John Walsh (America's Most Wanted) who founded the Adam Walsh Child Protection Act. There was a 14-year-old girl who defied her parent's rule against social networking and had an online relationship with an older man. Shortly after she was raped by the man who traveled from a nearby state to prey on her, she committed suicide.

"Parents have a well-founded concern about the safety of their children online,” said SpectorSoft President C. Douglas Fowler. “When we learned of the opportunity to share our experience in a groundbreaking effort, it was an easy decision to join.”

SpectorSoft develops, markets and supports PC and Internet monitoring and surveillance products for education, business, government, and now home users and has joined forces with the ISTTF Task Force. Together, they work with more than 20 industry-leading businesses, not-for-profit organizations, and technology companies such as AOL, AT&T, Comcast, Google, Microsoft, MySpace, NCMEC, Symantec, Verizon, and Yahoo!, to help squash online crime.

Rob Nickel, a former police sergeant has caught hundreds of online predators. Sgt Nickel offers parents several tips to protect their children and demonstrates how Spector Pro developed an easy to install and use Monitoring Software package for parents. These affordable yet powerful programs run on your computer and they display passwords as well as what your kids do on MySpace and Facebook. One even notifies you if your kids enter forbidden keywords or try entering adult website addresses. "Children won't know it's on and it will track all of their chats, what's going out in email and keystrokes" said Nickel. Parents can view this information from any online computer anywhere in the world!

CBS Science and Technology Correspondent Daniel Sieberg: "For any parent concerned about what their kids are doing in the digital domain, (this) software program can log every keystroke; keep track of every Web page, read every e-mail, instant message, etc. Users can even set keyword "alerts," so if a child types or reads something they deem inappropriate an e-mail is sent to the person who installed the software." Is this high-tech parenting or old-fashioned prying?   CBS Evening News says Spector Software is a "High Tech Parenting Tool."

Another concerned parent in Memphis secretly installed Spector software on his 13- year-old stepdaughter's personal computer and discovered, by reading her private e-mails, that she was planning on having sex with her 37-year-old schoolteacher. That stepfather’s decision to purchase and install Spector on his daughter’s computer probably saved the young teens life, for sure, he saved her innocence.

There are crimes committed in the US every day against children that do not involve high-tech crime or online predators. But for those parents concerned about protecting their children from “the dark side” of the internet Spector Soft is the best product available. Be safe online.

Tony Cox
CEO ARRESTED.COM

©2009 ARRESTED.COM