The work phone is on EE. Went to load up one of the mainstream porn sites having successfully done a modicum of work but forgot that my personal ipad was tethered to my work phone because I can’t pay my internet bill at the moment. The tab on the ipad went to an EE page that something about corporate content policy or similar. Immediately realised what I had done, closed browser, switched over to my own phone hotspot, and err…carried on. Post-nut clarity is making me wonder if there’s been an alert or notification sent to my employers by EE.
13 comments
there won’t be an alert sent but it will appear in the logs, depends how bored/on the ball the sys admins are.
HR are just printing off your P45 now.
If it comes up, just tell them what happened as per your post. Say it was a lapse of judgement, own up, move on. No point in lying. I doubt they’re gonna be knocking on your door with a P45 tho.
No one will notice it mate. Used to do a job where me monitored stuff like this and 99% of the time we never checked the activity logs and the 1% that we did was in relation to something else.
Say you were trying to read about tractors
Doubt they’ll notice but get yourself a VPN in future.
My advice would be to create a distraction, maybe Google “how do you make bombs?” Or something like that into a colleagues computer, they’ll be so busy with that one they’ll never notice your porn usage
Accidentally, whilst searching for tractor no doubt.
Should have started your post with “asking for an MP”
If your honest and it was not during work time I doubt anyone would care even if they do notice. You didn’t then try to get around it or try any other sites, so a single ping is unlikely to be investigated (unless they are looking for ways to lay you off). If it did come up just say was connected to wrong device and leave it at that (assuming site was legal if it was say an illegal say underage site then may be issues)
Unlikely. If they are set up to detect porn site access, they would block it too. So, if you’d seen a “This site is blocked. If you need access to this site email your IT Help desk” then there’s a good chance it would show up in a report or maybe even trigger an immediate alert.
However, there’s no sense it detecting the access and doing nothing about it, so 99% sure they’ve no idea.
My company scans outgoing Internet access pretty aggressively (mainly to prevent IP theft/leakage) and occasionally you can’t risk blocking something (like email) because it’s so annoying if you block it incorrectly. In those cases we basically send an alert to the security team who manually investigate. But noone would waste time doing that for porn, it’s only for revenue threatening stuff like sharing product data.
Sysadmin Here:
Any IT Team worth their salt will be monitoring mobile data usage. Filtering is ususally done with categories such as Social Media, Pornographic & Adult, extremism, healthcare, jobseeking, Streaming, etc you get the idea.
Access to these categories is based on your companies internal acceptable usage and security policies. For example you may be permitted access to social media If you’re a social media manager but not if you’re working in accounting, but noone will be able to access hacking websites.
If we really want to, we can see every website which you visit when using a company – provisioned device.
However, we don’t actively investigate unless we are asked to by a manager / HR. Continually monitoring web traffic, especially for something as benign as porn, just isn’t worth the effort unless we’re asked to investigate.
Tldr: 99% chance you’ll be fine, just don’t do it again
I once worked on an information desk and got an email from HR saying they wanted to speak to me about watching porn in the work computer.I was baffled as I hadn’t but the log showed a site with forbidden parameters.
Anyway when they investigated, it was a site for the local zoo I had pulled up to tell someone the telephone number and it showed as sex content because it had a section about some animals in the mating season.