Sixty second hypothetical.

[rivka]

Your boss lets her nine-year-old son hang out in your office sometimes, when she's working in the evening or on weekends. When he's here, he uses your computer. (And never puts the mouse back on the left side, but that's beside the point.)

You have Internet Explorer set up to clear the history file every day, but IE also keeps track of URLs which have been directly typed in - you can access them from the address bar. One of the ways you can tell that your boss's son has been using your computer is that sites like cartoonnetwork.com and nickelodeon.com appear in the address bar menu. Okay. But one morning, nakedladys.com is right in there with the addresses for cartoon websites. You click on the link to make sure it's not an ironically-named site for kids. It's not.

You have no idea whether your institution monitors Internet usage for porn viewing, although it's pretty obvious that no one is checking to see how much time you spend on non-work-related sites in general.

Do you tell your boss? And if so, what do you tell her?

Comments

[perigee.livejournal.com]

I would be probably be concerned and paranoid that someone would give me crap about where he was surfing. I'd probably ask around to find out what other people thought were the nicest ways of putting it, but I would definitely tell my boss what was going on. It could, after all, have been some sort of pirated link he clicked on and he could only have been looking for the half second it took him to realize where the link had taken him. You just can't know that kind of info without timestamped network sniffing.

But I would also be tempted to tell my boss that I'd be happy to give her and/or her son a tutorial on how to clear the IE history function, unless I personally relied on the history function for my own purpsoes.

Also, it would be a great time to find out what she knew about the details of the web surfing monitoring in your institution. :>