Company eyes Web at work
Bonita firm can catch Net activity

By DICK HOGAN, dhogan@news-press.com


From the Ft. Myers News-Press

Better be sure you get that online Christmas shopping done early this year your employer could be getting ready to hire ICaughtYou.com.




THE I'S HAVE IT:


Richard Schmidt, Aaron Shepherd, Jerry Steiner and Larry Sosinski are marketing ICaughtYou.com, which offers software that keeps track of where employees travel on the Internet.
Click on image to enlarge.





The Bonita Springs-based company is on the cutting edge of an industry built on the cocainelike addiction of bored workers to Internet shopping, surfing, pornography, resume posting and e-mailing friends and relatives.

It's the first company to spring to life in a business "incubator" run by Bonita-based Stellar Business Builders. Using a Web-based system, it sorts through all the Internet activity of employees and warns the boss if company policy has been violated.

"Web surfing seems to be the biggest concern," said Larry Sosinski, vice president of sales and marketing for the company. "Second is chat rooms and e-mail."

The company is the first to roll out a technology known as application service provider, in which clients don't have to purchase any hardware or software it's all at Icaughtyou's headquarters, he said.

Currently, the company's equipment is being tested by a state government office in Miami and two other clients will be hooked up shortly, he said. The $8 to $10 monthly charge per employee is cheap at the cost, said Richard Schmidt, a partner in Stellar Business. "We can report violations of employees on e-mailing to competitors, giving out trade secrets, spending time on personal correspondence when they should be working."

Icaughtyou also provides quick notification of sexual harassment or flirting, he said activities that can end up causing legal problems for an employer who can be liable even if an employee happens to see something offensive on a co-worker's computer screen.

Not everybody thinks such surveillance is a good idea, however.

"Is what Icaughtyou.com doing illegal? No. Is it offensive? Yes," said Randall Marshall, Miami-based legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida.

A private employer isn't prevented by the Constitution from surveillance of Internet activity, he said, although a government entity may be.

However, for any employer it's a bad policy, Marshall said. "I think ultimately what this does is to create a very demoralized workplace." He suggested that employers should be able to notice that a worker isn't performing well without having to use surveillance. "They should be sitting down with the employee to see what the problem is."

But Schmidt said workers' attitude can be hurt by a lack of surveillance as well. "You have an employee working hard and another one right next to him surfing and trading and Christmas shopping, and morale goes right down."

He said the Internet is just too tempting for companies to take the candy-factory strategy of letting workers eat all they want because they eventually get sick of it.

"The difference there is that people eventually fill up on candy," he said. "But there's an endless variety of pages on the Web, endless things to do."


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