The price of indiscretion
04-06-2004
by Matthew Clark

This week's headlines have proved once again that pornography, the Internet and indiscretion are best kept apart. Matthew Clark reports.

With adult sites now an integral part of the Web, reports detailing the rise of on-line pornography had become almost passé -- almost. But then, just days ago, Bank of Ireland CEO Mike Soden was caught in the act: employee-monitoring software revealed that he had visited sites containing adult material. The price of his indiscretion was his job, and possibly his career. As Soden pointed out in a statement following his resignation, he did nothing illegal. But he embarrassed the bank and presumably himself and, more importantly, he broke company rules that forbid such behaviour.

However, there may be some solace for the former BoI boss in knowing that he is far from alone. Just days before the scandal broke, Ireland-based content filtering firm PixAlert, along with the Irish Software Association (ISA) and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, said that it had carried out a "porn in the workplace" survey and discovered that some 40 percent of companies in Ireland have had to deal with the issue of employees downloading or viewing adult content on computers at work.

"To put the figures in perspective, you can look at reports from the American Management Association (AMA) which show that about 27 percent of Fortune 500 companies have had to cope with sexual harassment issues due to inappropriate images," commented Dave McLoughlin, director of PixAlert. It's worth noting that not every "incident" is Soden-like, with some resulting in mere warnings.

Still, the 40 percent figure is rather striking, despite the fact that on-line pornography -- though not exactly accepted -- is certainly commonplace. The banality of pornography may contribute to the apparent willingness of staff to have a peek, even when some 90 percent of larger firms in Ireland have policies in place to stop such activity. (PixAlert claims, however, that about 25 percent of these policies are out of date.)

"When you have companies that employ 500 or 600 people, and everyone has a computer, this kind of thing is going to happen. It's impossible to avoid. But companies must still protect themselves in order to avoid possible lawsuits and other problems," says McLoughlin.

In small companies, the issue of "Internet misuse" is far more pertinent, mainly because only 57 percent of smaller Irish companies have comprehensive Internet and e-mail usage policies, according to an April study from the Small Firms Association. According to SFA assistant director Patricia Callan, smut surfing and other time-wasting on-line activities cost smaller Irish companies over EUR300 million a year in lost productivity. Expenses relating to sexual harassment lawsuits -- and possibly criminal trials for illegal pornography -- can be even greater. Worse still is that few company directors are aware that they can be held personally liable and sentenced to up to five years in prison if staff are caught with child pornography on work PCs.

Whether a company protects itself or not, porn and Internet access are now inseparable. And it would seem that the voracious yearning for adult content can't be satisfied. US e-mail filtering company N2H2 claims that viewing of on-line porn globally has risen 1,800 percent, from 14 million Web pages in 1998 to 260 million in 2003. Meanwhile, a survey in the US from employee-monitoring software firm WebSense reveals that 22 percent of male employees have viewed pornography at work and 13 percent of that group say it was intentional.

But what's interesting is that another e-mail filtering company, Clearswift, insists that only 5 percent of the world's spam e-mail in April included advertisements for adult Web sites, compared to about 22 percent last year. The seemingly contradictory numbers suggest that licentious Web surfers no longer rely on pornographers' spam to point them to new sites; users know the content is out there, and plenty know exactly where to find it. Some employers even endorse certain porn sites. In Denmark, for example, an IT company called LL Media has provided its workers with free subscriptions to adult content sites in order to prevent time-wasting at work, and to help workers relax at home, it says.

To be fair, there are probably more indications that porn is far from mainstream. Internet giant Yahoo's recent decision to stop selling adult films and to bury its adult chat rooms suggests that the company has swapped the dot-com era "anything goes" philosophy for a more wholesome and controlled environment. Meanwhile, some estimates of the value of subscriptions to Internet porn sites peg the market at only about USD300 million per year, although concrete figures are hard to come by. According to anti-sex industry campaigner and Swedish MEP Marianne Eriksson, Europeans spent USD320 million in 2001 on porn sites.

Either way, the estimates fall far short of predictions five years ago. Yet they also point to an inescapable truth: with millions at stake, Internet porn is here to stay. After all, sex sells.