Ask Slashdot: Low-Cost Tools To Track Employees' Web Use? 384
First time accepted submitter red-nz writes "I come from New Zealand where new anti-piracy laws have come into effect that prosecute the owner of the internet connection for copyright violations. This is now a major issue for businesses, as they of course don't want to be liable for employee infringements. We have some good firewalls that are capable of doing basic filtering by 'category,' e.g. P2P sites, etc., but ideally would love to find a low-cost or even better Open Source alternative to expensive reporting tools (such as WebMarshal or Websense) that is capable of reporting on individual employees' usage with friendly reports (i.e. dont just show the URLs of the 3000 items their browser requested that day). It may be too much to ask but if the software could also show how long they spent on each site, it would be fantastic. Anyone got any winners out there they can share?"
Alternative (Score:4, Interesting)
IANAL especially not in New Zealand
Change the employee agreement (Score:3, Interesting)
If the employer also becomes a private ISP, and every employee is charged 1NZD per month for internet access at their workstation (taken straight from the paycheck, after everybody gets a 12NZD/year raise), then they own and are liable for the internet connection at their desk, not the company.
Re:and it's thwarted with...... (Score:4, Interesting)
The result is that monthly quotas end up being just as important (if not moreso) than bandwidth to a typical user. For example, take a look at these broadband prices [telecom.co.nz] and the extremely low (by US standards) "data allowances".
I'm pretty sure that the case where a employee has a better connection at home than at work would be quite rare in NZ.
Or encrypted to a nearby country (Score:5, Interesting)
What would cost more, censorware acceptable to the government, or a small server hosted in the Philippines?
Understand the problem before trying to fix it (Score:3, Interesting)
The 3-strikes law covers P2P traffic only. Adding web traffic reporting isn't going to do anything to help you.
Now if you are being asked to do web traffic reporting then sit down with management and work out what they want, why and who is going to be responsible for reviewing traffic (hint - this should be HR not IT). Doing this should give you enough information to justify some expenditure, even if it is just a new server/VM for Squid.