John over at Church IT has put up a short post about “Monitoring Your Church Staff’s Internet Usage“.

Those of you who read this blog regularly will know that I’m a wee bit passionate about protecting your own equipment and in helping guide your children down the path of healthy surfing and computer use. So you won’t be surprised to know that I’ve added a comment or two.

Today, the following comment was added:

I just don’t know about actively monitoring staff or employee computers. It seems like spying. I’ve always found that having everyone sign a computer and internet agreement policy and then locking down everything that wasn’t email or internet browsing through the router was plenty. There’s no reason to spend any amount of money or time installing monitoring software. It makes people feel like you don’t trust them and they don’t really work anyway. If you just have to see what your staff has been doing on the web most routers keep a log of every site visited and with what computer and at what time.

Well I was going to type up my reply on John’s blog but it started getting a little long, so instead I’m answering it here.

Initially I have to say that this approach by the commenter seems very narrow or naive. But please don’t get me wrong – I’m not trying to belittle the author of the comment but address the issues raised. It may be that they’ve never really thought through the process or indeed are just reacting to the idea of a big brother type approach.

My first response has to be that trusting the staff is not a good approach to good stewardship or our church resources – be that time, staff, kit, money, whatever. Let me put it this way. Do we really know everyone on staff that well that we can trust them 100% not to do something they shouldn’t? Secondly, I don’t see it (and nor do I promote it) as spying or monitoring usage but rather giving the user peace of mind if they inadvertently click on a dodgy link. And by dodgy I simply mean it could download malware, a virus, an advert to something unsavoury or even a disguised link to a site we wouldn’t want to be visiting.

The issue of trust is a strange one to bring up as a defence for not using control methods – as christians we shouldn’t judge our fellows but the bible (to my knowledge) doesn’t say we should trust everyone. There is a difference. Trust is earned, it is not a right. This goes equally for the pastor as it does for the children’s church worker who only uses the computer once a week. If anything, I would have to argue it applies even more to the pastor than others.

If there is software or hardware available to aid this process then we are acting unwise to not use it.

My second response in to spy or not is to ask what could happen if we don’t? I won’t attempt to address legal issues or ramifications in this post as they vary from country to country and possibly state to state in America. However general principles are likely to be the same. It is almost certain that as an employer (and because it’s a church it is unlikely to be excluded here) that there is some form of expectation on them to be able to identify criminal activity that originates from within their place of work.

Does your country require employers to maintain logs? Well then there’s another valid reason to “spy”.

The next issue to address, though not directly raised by the comment, is abuse. Abuse is also a very emotive word so let me clarify – by abuse I mean doing something on the computer issued by my employer that is not in line with their business. Let’s look at some statistics:

• Non-work related Internet surfing results in up to a 40% loss in productivity each year at American businesses. – Gartner Group
• 85.6% of employees use office email for personal reasons.
  - NFO Worldwide
• 70% of all web traffic to Internet pornography sites occurs during the work hours of 9am-5pm.
  - Sex Tracker
• 92% of online stock trading occurs from the workplace during work hours.
• 64% of employees have received politically incorrect or offensive emails at work.
  - Business Week
• 30% of American workers watch sports online while at work.
• 24% of American workers admit to shopping online while at work.
• Employees use company high-speed Internet access to visit sites such as Broadcast.com and MP3.com more frequently at work than they do at home because of the high-speed Internet access at work.
  -Nielsen Ratings
• 30 to 40% of Internet use in the workplace is not related to business.
  - IDC Research
• 37% of workers say they surf the Web constantly at work.
  - Vault.com
• People are spending more time surfing the Internet at work than they are at home, mainly because home Web connection speeds pale in comparison to the faster connections that companies give their employees.
  - ZDNet Interactive Investor, 2/18/00
• 77.7% of major U.S. companies keep tabs on employees by checking their e-mail, Internet, phone calls, computer files, or by videotaping them at work.
  - American Management Association
• 63% of companies monitor workers’ Internet connections and 47% store and review employee e-mail.
  - American Management Association
  27% of companies say that they’ve fired employees for misuse of office e-mail or Internet connections, and 65% report some disciplinary measure for those offenses.
  - American Management Association
• Misuse of the Internet among employees has become a major concern, especially within the last few years.
  - Computer-Monitoring.com

None of those really make for pretty reading.

Ok, so remove the pornography ones. Let’s say we trust our church staff that much; or should we?

• A 1996 Promise Keepers survey at one of their stadium events revealed that over 50% of the men in attendance were involved with pornography within one week of attending the event.
• 51% of pastors say cyber-porn is a possible temptation. 37% say it is a current struggle -
  Christianity Today, Leadership Survey, 12/2001.
• Over half of evangelical pastors admits viewing pornography last year.
• Roger Charman of Focus on the Family’s Pastoral Ministries reports that approximately 20 percent of the calls received on their Pastoral Care Line are for help with issues such as pornography and compulsive sexual behavior.
• In a 2000 Christianity Today survey, 33% of clergy admitted to having visited a sexually explicit Web site. Of those who had visited a porn site, 53% had visited such sites “a few times” in the past year, and 18% visit sexually explicit sites between a couple of times a month and more than once a week.
• 29% of born again adults in the U.S. feel it is morally acceptable to view movies with explicit sexual behavior
  - The Barna Group.
• 57% of pastors say that addiction to pornography is the most sexually damaging issue to their congregation
  - Christians and Sex Leadership Journal Survey, March 2005.

Sobering isn’t it?

If pastorscan suffer this, then how much more do we mere non-pastors suffer the same temptations? You could argue that most of your church staff are female so this wouldn’t apply … well think again as an ‘Internet Filter Review’ survey revealed that 10% of adults admit to surfing for porn and of that 10% over a quarter (28%) are female.

I’m hoping that you are all starting to see why I believe so passionately in filtering or guiding. We have to accept that we live in a flawed world and that we are also flawed – some of us more so than others. After all, we came to Christ recognising we were flawed.

In my next post (hopefully) I’ll cover some of the benefits of filtering so that if you need it, you can go off and comfortably debate the issue and be armed with good reasons why we should.

Emotive words like “spying” are good words to use for stopping us from implementing policies and methods to guide; so I’m hoping to provide you with good reasons to start ‘spying’ – if the above hasn’t already convinced you. Maybe in another post I’ll cover some of the ways you could do this – and preferably for free. And with me, free doesn’t always mean just because it’s the cheapest.