Really? Porn In The Workplace Is Now A Major Board-Level Concern For Business | Hacker News Reader

Really? Porn In The Workplace Is Now A Major Board-Level Concern For Business

businesscomputingworld.co.uk

13 pointsBlish12321 comments

This article was written by someone who sells email utilities like spam blockers, etc. This is his proposed solution to the problem:

"This non-confrontational approach can be achieved by using an e-mail monitoring tool that will not only monitor activity but can also be set to automatically respond to the activity in a variety of ways."

It doesn't look like he has a specific porn-filtering utility, but overall I think his opinion is a little biased.

The industry sells image analysers hard. I've run ones by M86 Security and IronPort, and couldn't implement them based on the suggested approach, i.e. an automatic email wagging a finger at a suspected infringement. Not only do your employees now feel that they're working for the Ministry of Truth, but I imagine that you may have some problems if you consistently get it wrong and falsely accuse people based on a piece of software.

Yeah, I'd get pissed off if I got an email every time I accidentally saw a racy picture at work. It happens more often than you think, usually when you're reading about some current event and you read, "Hey, I know someone who this actually happened to. She blogged about it _here_..." and you end up on a blog full of pictures of the blogger dressed up for lolicon or cosplay. I don't want to be auto-badgered by some image recognition program. If anything, badger me for reading non-work-related news while I'm supposed to be working. ... :-O Cntl-w

This is funny, because here in France, a kinda soft-porn site called BonjourMadame, www.bonjourmadame.fr, has taken offices by storm. The concept is simple: each day at 10am, they publish a new mind-blowing picture.

Each day, across all offices I know, men (and some women, duh) huddle around a screen and F5 repeatedly. Someone exclaims "Bonjour, Madame!" and everybody knows the new pic is up. And nobody seems to be bothered, until now. And it's even popular in what are otherwise stodgy environments : investment banking, big Fortune 500 corps.

It's got to the point that network admins have set up special cache rules for this site to avoid serving stale copies. Funny. Also, I have nothing to do with the site.

Thanks for the URL correction.

In the interest of correctness, the link is actually http://www.bonjourmadame.fr/

Mind-blowing is a pretty good description of today's pic.

After looking at the archives I'd have to say it's pretty tame ^_^.

Also, the running joke is to ask your colleagues "Have you said bonjour to the madame today guys ?"

I'm annoyed by the complete lack of reasoning behind the assumption porn ought to be especially rejected from workplaces. I'm neutral on the conclusion itself.

Porn isn't work - neither is reading hacker news, and every sane employer knows that employees need breaks.

Some porn is sexist and objectifying - arguably not all of it, and a lot of other things are sexist and objectifying too; are those being equally purged? That might be a good idea. And what about explicitly feminist porn?

The article mentions the protection from harassment act - that protects against whatever repeated actions knowingly cause alarm and distress. Porn per se is never mentioned. No doubt it can be a tool of harassment. Ought it to be automatically assumed to equal harassment?

The word "inappropriate" is often used - to my mind, that's just a value judgment, like "sinful", unless it's bundled with a reason that stands up to scrutiny, and unless every other thing that would be caught by that reasoning is treated the same. Inappropriate why?

People reading HN at work are unlikely to make their colleagues feel uncomfortable.

People looking at (image-based) porn at work are extremely likely to make at least some of their colleagues feel uncomfortable. That's not cool.

It doesn't really matter if you feel your colleagues ought or ought not to feel uncomfortable - some of them almost certainly will, and it's frankly antisocial behaviour to act in ways that will offend your colleagues, regardless of whether they "should" be offended.

The particular nature of the porn is irrelevant - whether objectifying, sexist of otherwise. (Except if it's text-only perhaps. That would get in people's face much less.)

(And all of the above would be equally true, for example, for image-heavy neo-fascist boards.)

OK, that's a justification; would you apply it equally to everything that is just as likely to make others uncomfortable?

This site just matched a lot of spam filters on

   explicit...porn

Well, if porn in the workplace keeps government law enforcement agencies from doing their job to stop serious crimes,

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hOvd2ZHpLg...

maybe it should be a concern in those agencies, whether or not it is a concern to profit-making private businesses.

Problem: board members want to pretend the problem doesn't exist.

Solution: install token software and pretend that the problem is solved.

In 'big business', solving a problem is less important than exhibiting attempts to solve said problem.

I'm glad I got out of that world when I did.

A.k.a., solving a problem is less important than shifting responsibility.

    > Furthermore, no line manager relishes the task of 
    > chastising a top sales person for their use of porn; 
    > nor does the business want to risk losing a number of 
    > valuable employees as a result of their inappropriate 
    > behaviour.

I'd actually say that in that case (a top sales guy or a valuable employee) there is no problem at all. If they are truly top performers, what does their favorite break-time activity (so long as it's not a liability) have to do with anything?

You answered your own question in your second parenthetical.

What is the definition of "porn" in "one in five men admitting to accessing porn at work"? I'll freely admit to having looked at an image of a scantily-clad woman at work (from a major news outlet of all places), but is that... "inappropiate material", "porn" or what?.. I can see it being brand damaging if (female) customers had seen me watch it. I don't get how they reached the broad-sweeping (and inaccurate IMO) conclusion:"The merging of the home/office world is complete." and "From personal e-mails to social networking and downloading porn, individuals will continue to exploit the corporate network for personal use if they can" ("exploit"?). I try to keep a degree of separation between work and home, and I believe most do the same (though "home" can be the laptop I bring with me to work) - I don't use my work PC for downloading porn or dating - I do use it for personal email or some kinds of "socialization" like HN.

HN isn't socialization, it is... ummm, continuing education.

> Under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, employers have a legal obligation to prove they are taking all reasonable practical measures to protect staff from inappropriate material. Companies and individual executives can also face criminal prosecution if employees are found using the company’s IT infrastructure to distribute porn, or they fail to prevent employees from downloading child pornography into the workplace.

It seems like the author is concerned mainly with a company's criminal liability for allowing access to porn. The solution to this is a political one: in a free society, people should not be criminally liable for exchanging offensive information.

This is about to get a lot more complicated. Given that more and more people have access to internet on their phones, it'd be quite easy for someone to temporary tether to their phone to access whatever they want

Reply on news.ycombinator.com