Software to filter workers' access

Net filtering firm SurfWatch
Software today released a Professional Edition, aimed at keeping workers
off unauthorized Web sites during business hours.

Filtering software has been a choice among parents and schools to keep
children out of the Net's many "red light districts," such as sites
containing pornography, gambling, and hate speech.

But filtering also has
been widely criticized by civil liberties groups that charge that the
technology blocks socially important speech such as sites about breast
cancer, safe sex, and homosexuality. Groups such as People for the American Way and the American Civil Liberties Union have sued public libraries for
installing filters, charging that doing so is censorship and therefore
unconstitutional.

SurfWatch, a division of Spyglass,
began to make its software more accessible last year by putting it on a proxy server, and found that 20 percent of those downloading
it were corporate clients, even though it wasn't designed for corporations,
said Theresa Marcroft, director of marketing for SurfWatch.

"More and more companies are rolling out widespread Net access to their
employees," Marcroft said. "And they're also adding Internet acceptable use
policies," noting that the firm's research found that the number of
companies with formal Net acceptable use policies has increased from 31
percent to more than 50 percent in the last nine months.

"The logical next step for them is software tools like ours," she said.

She said corporate clients have expressed concern about Net access
affecting overall productivity, as workers use it to make vacation plans,
shop, chat, job hunt, and generally surf non-work-related sites. Similarly,
many corporations have had difficulty with employees' use of email for
personal communication.

Another worry for companies with widespread Net access is liability.
Marcroft cited the firing last month of two Salomon Smith Barney analysts for
sending pornography over company email, which can be considered creating a
hostile work environment. She said employees chatting online could give
away proprietary company information or data that constitutes insider trading,
and since the communication comes from the company, it could look as though
the firm is endorsing it, Marcroft said.

Bandwidth also is a concern for companies, she noted; as employees download
movie clips and other large files, access for business purposes can be slowed.

SurfWatch's Professional Edition contains 15 categories for sites to be
filtered: astrology, entertainment, games, general news, glamour or
intimate apparel, hobbies, investments, job
search, motor vehicles, personals or dating, real estate, shopping, sports,
travel, and Usenet.

Marcroft pointed out that the biggest concern among clients is blocking
sexually explicit content, but many want to simply monitor the other
categories "to see if there is an issue there." The SurfWatch Professional
Edition allows for that.

It also allows for multiple levels of filtering, blocking by time of day or
days of the week, and customization of access by individual or department,
she said.

With over-filtering an issue for blocking access for children, it could
present a problem for companies in that they may need access to sites
blocked by the software. A pharmaceutical company that wants to filter
sexually explicit content could need access to breast cancer sites, for
example.

Marcroft said SurfWatch publishes its filtering
criteria and also has a staff of people who check each potential site
before it gets added to the company's database of filtered sites.

SurfWatch Professional Edition runs on Netscape and Microsoft Proxy Servers
and the Check Point
Firewall-1. Pricing starts at $995 for a 50-user license. Electronic
versions are available for downloading
this week; the CD-ROM will be available later this month.