No surfing at the workplace

The increase in the usage of social networking sites like Facebook, Orkut, apart from chatting online, has led to Internet restrictions in offices.

Most companies ban Internet primarily for security reasons. Since computers in offices have very important information stored in them, certain websites have the capacity to pick up these information and reveal it to unwanted sources.
In order to block this, some companies ban Internet. Also, some of them are of the opinion that it can stop unnecessary wastage of time.

Sulthan Khan, co-owner of Pallete Interactive Agency, says, “An important reason
for curbing Internet usage is because we don’t want important information from the company leaked out knowingly or unknowingly. Also, every minute an employee spends in the office is accountable and should be productive enough. The emergence of Facebook, LinkedIn, chatting online, will lead to spending a lot of time on the Net. Once a person gets into any of these sites, it is tough to decide as to how long they will continue to be on it. With one’s interest completely in this, the attention towards office work will reduce drastically.”

There are some employees who completely understand why this ban has been imposed by their companies. Narasimha Murthy, a software engineer, says, “I have no issues about Internet ban in my office as I totally understand that there are some tools in some websites which have a high potential to copy all the valid information available in my system. Once these tools catch hold of one system, it does not take long to hack into other systems in the office. When such things happen, the company stands to lose a lot. E-mail websites can be spared as they don’t seem to have that quality in them,” he says.
However, some employees are furious about imposing the ban on some very necessary websites.

Remya, a language specialist, says, “It is ridiculous to ban Internet in office. This happened in our company very recently and it is very inconvenient. It has gone to such an extent that basic things, which are a big necessity for us, like e-mail websites and some famous language websites have also been blocked. I find this very weird. It just
does not serve the purpose.

In fact, these measures will tempt us to find other means of gaining access to the Internet. It makes us all the more restless.We can remain unproductive at work place without the Internet also,” she adds.