Nobody anywhere has time to waste on logging, and nobody really wants to review employee internet usage. That doesn’t mean it isn’t taking place. What makes you so certain it isn’t happening to you? Logging doesn’t take time, it’s automated, and nobody has to actively review internet usage, it can happen as needed when either some automated alarm goes off or when your company is contacted by another company or an ISP or the government regarding internet usage. Your GP comment above feels quite flippant, and makes me suspect you might not be aware of the realities of running a company, and may be lacking imagination for the kinds of things IT teams anywhere have to do just to set up a network and provide internet access to you, not to mention establish security rules, create QOS tables, and deal with real-world employee behavior. A lot of corporate routers and other network appliances do some level of logging by default.
Maybe you work for a tiny startup that hasn’t started logging your usage yet, but pretty much all non-small companies in the US have to have automated monitoring of usage for liability reasons (I guess you didn’t actually read my links). Many companies need to know how much time employees spend on Facebook while at work in the aggregate, and while finding that out might seem creepy, what’s also creepy is employees being on Facebook while they’re getting paid to work. Even if you don’t, some people have problems with this and spend a lot of time on Facebook, or other sites, while getting paid to supposedly work. Internet usage monitoring is often the result of employee complaints to management about other employees.
One company I worked at received legal threats from a media conglomerate because of torrent sharing of new release movies. Turns out the employee was just downloading porn because the work internet connection was much higher bandwidth than his home connection, and a hidden bot in the software he was using was doing other illegal torrent activity. The company didn’t figure it out immediately because they weren’t creepily actively reviewing internet connections, but between the logs that were there and some sleuthing, they figured out who the employee was. My company didn’t give a crap about the porn (though told the employee please never do that at work) but the movies being shared could have been millions of dollars in damage.
If you are at a small company that isn’t monitoring yet, and your company grows, it will happen to you eventually. Otherwise, if you’re not at a small company, chances are high that you already are being logged and don’t know it. In any case, there’s no good reason to pass judgement on HN users who work for companies that do this; it’s ubiquitous and there is no clear cut line on where monitoring begins, and more importantly no reasonable expectation of privacy while at work in the US, except in the bathroom.
Aside from all that, your ISP and the backbone providers and the ISPs of every site you visit is - 100% chance - monitoring connections. The majority of commercial sites on the internet are gathering analytics. Facebook and Google are watching everything they possibly can. Your employer monitoring may be the least of your problems, as long as you’re not surfing all day at work.
Maybe you work for a tiny startup that hasn’t started logging your usage yet, but pretty much all non-small companies in the US have to have automated monitoring of usage for liability reasons (I guess you didn’t actually read my links). Many companies need to know how much time employees spend on Facebook while at work in the aggregate, and while finding that out might seem creepy, what’s also creepy is employees being on Facebook while they’re getting paid to work. Even if you don’t, some people have problems with this and spend a lot of time on Facebook, or other sites, while getting paid to supposedly work. Internet usage monitoring is often the result of employee complaints to management about other employees.
One company I worked at received legal threats from a media conglomerate because of torrent sharing of new release movies. Turns out the employee was just downloading porn because the work internet connection was much higher bandwidth than his home connection, and a hidden bot in the software he was using was doing other illegal torrent activity. The company didn’t figure it out immediately because they weren’t creepily actively reviewing internet connections, but between the logs that were there and some sleuthing, they figured out who the employee was. My company didn’t give a crap about the porn (though told the employee please never do that at work) but the movies being shared could have been millions of dollars in damage.
If you are at a small company that isn’t monitoring yet, and your company grows, it will happen to you eventually. Otherwise, if you’re not at a small company, chances are high that you already are being logged and don’t know it. In any case, there’s no good reason to pass judgement on HN users who work for companies that do this; it’s ubiquitous and there is no clear cut line on where monitoring begins, and more importantly no reasonable expectation of privacy while at work in the US, except in the bathroom.
Aside from all that, your ISP and the backbone providers and the ISPs of every site you visit is - 100% chance - monitoring connections. The majority of commercial sites on the internet are gathering analytics. Facebook and Google are watching everything they possibly can. Your employer monitoring may be the least of your problems, as long as you’re not surfing all day at work.