Is it legal to control employees web surfing?

Is it legal to control which sites employees visit during work time?
Or is it better to filter web surfing in a preventive way? Click here to find out!

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According to research conducted by Spiceworks in 2018, already at that time 96% of large companies, that is, companies with more than 1,000 employees, used to block access to at least one website online.

The Spiceworks research also found that 58% of the companies analyzed reportedly monitored employee Internet activity on corporate networks. As with any other control activity, there are two sides to this story. For one, there are security considerations. On the other hand, the ethical.

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However, network security is not the only security sought by companies and organizations. There is also a lot of debate about relevance in the workplace: 84% of IT departments believe that preventing users from visiting websites deemed inappropriate for the workplace was a main reason for restricting Internet use, and 83% he thought this might help avoid user behavior perceived as “unacceptable”. Both of these reasons are also linked to a much broader theme, which is to improve employee productivity in the workplace, a reason chosen by 46% of those surveyed.

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The final reason has more to do with a company’s physical resources: preventing access to certain websites helps prevent bandwidth issues. This is especially true with streaming services, such as Netflix, YouTube or Spotify, whose use at a broad level can cause slowdowns throughout the company network.

You can activate the FlashStart® Cloud protection on any sort of Router and Firewall to secure desktop and mobile devices and IoT devices on local networks.