Can a company control the use of computers by their employees?
The obligation of an employee is to use hardware that makes it easy for the company to WORK.
No to porn, not to chat with friends, not to read sports newspapers, youtube videos irrelevant to their work, etc.
Now. Is it lawful for a company put a “sniffer” to analyze the network traffic and check which pages you visit and how long each employee remains in each? Is it lawful to analyze the emails entering and leaving the computer worker?
One company did and discovered that one of its employees, besides losing outrageously time (daily spent many hours surfing pages that had nothing to do with his work) company information sent to competition.
The company fired him and the employee appealed. At the end of several judicial remedies, the Supreme Court has considered unfair dismissal, because the evidence was obtained in violation of the privacy of the employee.
The KEY hue is this: Because no evidence that, "According to the requirement of good faith, the company had some kind of rules previously established for the use of such media, with application of absolute prohibitions or parciales- nor that he had informed the workers that are going to carry out checks and means to implement in order to check its correct use ".
I.e., the company has the right to completely control the use of computers by their employees IF THEY PREVIOUSLY ADVISED. The logic is to sign a document to each worker which clearly put the employee assumes that the purpose of the use of computers is working, you should not use them for purposes unrelated to the company, and should not be used to send or receive personal emails since all the information you send or receive through the internal network or Internet, may be subject to unannounced checks by the company.