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The inclusion of email harassment in the revised UK Sexual Offences Act could open companies up to legal troubles, said an industry insider.

The UK Sexual Offences Act 2003 was recently updated to include “improper use of public communications.” Because of this, a person sending sexually harassing emails could be handed a sexual offences prevention order (SOPO) and therefore be included on the national sex offender registry.

“It really has tremendous implications for any organisation because the widening of the sexual offenders act could mean employers have vicarious liability,” said Ed Macnair, CEO of internet security firm Marshal. “The person sending is prosecutable, but also the organisation.” He cited one case where a London hospital was held liable in a harassment suit involving members of staff and another in the US where an employee’s wife sued her husband’s firm because they facilitated his child pornography habits.

“You don’t want your chief operating officer on the sexual offender registry because somebody in the company did something,” Macnair said.

Source: ITPro

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MessageLabs is a provider of best-of-breed managed email security services for email, web and instant messaging communications - protecting globally over 13,000 customers from the latest viruses, spam and inappropriate content.

For more information, please visit Dicontas Services for MessageLabs Image Filtering & Content Control page.

Dicontas offers centralised email administration services to complement use of this managed service by helping to decrease the total cost of ownership and other business / legal risks when introducing and utilising email monitoring within the workplace.

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Postini has also expanded rapidly in the last few years, not quite at the rate of growth as spam itself but not far off that. It claims the number one position in the market for hosted email filtering. Expanding its business to include web filtering is an obvious choice for Postini as the email filtering nears saturation (although Postini continues to gain customers from churn in the market). Postini has 100s of ISP partners which could provide a lucrative route to market for its new web-filtering offering.

This has not gone unnoticed by other vendors. McAfee, the world’s largest pure-play IT security company, has itself formed a partnership with Postini and is reselling its managed filtering services. Microsoft made a couple of acquisitions recently—FrontBridge for email filtering and FutureSoft’s Dynacom I-Filter (buying its web filtering product, not the company)—so now has the capability to offer both services.

Two other UK companies, BlackSpider and SurfControl, got together in 2006 to achieve a similar goal. BlackSpider is a competitor to Postini that also provides a managed email filtering service. SurfControl has long been a competitor in the web filtering market. Along with companies such as Secure Computing and WebSense it provides filters for controlling what employees can do on the web. The aim of bringing the two companies together is to leverage one’s web filtering heritage with the other’s experience of providing a managed service.

Not to be left out, yet another UK company with a global presence, MessageLabs, also launched a hosted web filtering service in July 2006, to sit alongside its well established email filtering service. MessageLabs has a partnership with IBM, bringing the world’s number two IT vendor in to play (yes, if you haven’t already heard, HP’s latest quarterly figures allowed it to claim top spot).

Using managed filtering services is proving to be one of the most effective means of controlling web and email traffic.

Source : IT-director.com - 22/12/06 - Written by Quocirca

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One of the results of this tightening-up is a closer watch over employees and the information they share in the course of doing business. Thus, one survey found that 93 percent of companies have formal electronic communication retention and review policies.

The same survey – conducted by Fortiva, a company that provides secure e-mail archiving – also found that of those companies with such policies, 63 percent said that e-mail surveillance has improved their ability to see exposure to risks as a result of employee communications. As a result, 26 percent of companies said they have fired employees as a result of information they discovered through e-mail surveillance.

Companies seem to be achieving the intended results. Employees appear to be more aware of the risks inherent in e-mail and subsequently are monitoring themselves. 83 percent of companies say they do not prohibit employees from sending or receiving personal e-mails on the companies’ systems. Yet, 79 percent of businesses believe e-mail monitoring is deterring employees from sending or receiving e-mails that violate corporate rules and policies.

Extract from Richmond.com

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Why Are Employees monitoring your email?
In its landmark 7-2 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that employers are responsible for harassment — even if they are not aware that it is going on. Specifically, employers may be held liable if the employer “should have known of the conduct and fails to take immediate and appropriate corrective action.” (Burlington Industries v. Ellerth and Faragher v. City of Boca Raton)

The “should have known” standard is particularly troublesome when harassment involves email. How can a company know about every email message from its employees when thousands of messages are sent every day? Which messages should the company know about?

The liability for not knowing about email harassment can be substantial.

The good news is that the U.S. Supreme Court said that penalties and fines could be lessened if the companies exercised “reasonable care” to prevent and correct harassment. (Burlington Industries v. Ellerth and Faragher v. City of Boca Raton)

Many harassment suits are now focused on whether companies exercised “reasonable care.” Many companies compound their risk by the mistakes they make when handling email. Fortunately, there are steps that you can take - click on link below to view report.
Source: 7 Mistakes You Can Avoid With Email Harassment Cases - Inboxer

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A total of 300 people working in Wall Street and the City were surveyed by Orchestria, a company which makes software to enforce employees to use network resources in accordance with company policy and international regulations.

The research discovered that more than 60 per cent of respondents in New York thought that it was right that their employer should monitor their email. By contrast, only 38 per cent in London supported their firm’s right to monitor email.

Source : vnunet

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The Google Co-op tool has been used to allow you to search websites that contains content about email filtering and email monitoring.

You can use this custom search tool by visiting Google Custom Search on Email Filtering and Email Monitoring.

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This rss feed can be viewed in a browser, by visiting the web page below.

Blog Feeds Aggregator for Email Monitoring | Email Filtering | Email Administration

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I would like to hear your personal or professional views on the monitoring of email communications when adopted within an organisation.

This will be an open discussion to try to get different views from employees, administrators, middle management and company directors.

If you can touch on issues such as:

• How monitoring may affect staff morale and performance?
• Your rights to personal communications (maintaining your rights to privacy within the workplace, aka, the US/EU law on maintaining your rights to private life)
• When should email monitoring be adopted within an organisation?
• What is good about email monitoring, and in what circumstances?
• What is bad about email monitoring, and how can it be implemented better?
• Examples in the use of over-invasive email monitoring methods
• Do you agree or disagree with the guidelines and national regulations governing the monitoring of emails within the workplace?
• What are the alternatives to email monitoring (e.g. user education, better policy setting)

You can add any other relevant topics/points into the discussion.

If you wish to have your say then feel free to add your comments to this blog post. I would love to hear your view on this topic.

Please do not list any company, vendor or product names (or other identifiable information). If you do so, then your comments will be deleted and your opinions will not be read.

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1. Conduct an Impact Assessment to identify the business purpose for email monitoring and confine it to what is necessary to accomplish that purpose. Monitoring should only be used as necessary and not be intrusive on the employees’ email communication.

2. Develop, or modify, corporate policies that cover email use (such as the Acceptable Use Policy, Information Security Policy and/or Computer Use Policy). Make sure that all users accept these policies and they are documented.

3. Train users on current best practices of email management and use.

4. Allow management to appraise their staff regarding email use and what standards will be used to evaluate their performance.

5. Enforce and police all policies regarding email use at all times.

6. Consider which email monitoring tools are appropriate for the organisation. Only implement when supporting processes, procedures and resources are in place.

7. Frequently review and update corporate policies to ensure they fully comply with the law and regulations, and any changes thereafter.

8. Communicate any changes of policy to all email users and management.

9. Thoroughly consider the costs of excessive monitoring, such as ethics, low morale, high turnover, and potential lawsuits.

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Dicontas Content Aggregator Feed on Email Monitoring News, Blogs and Searches

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