Thanks for the quick reply SarEl. The company I work for is a large manufacturing plant. I have never been issued any guidelines on IT and Internet usage. They claim that I have approx 7500 websites logged against my logon for the last 2 months of 2010, I have no idea if this is excessive or not. I ran a not very scientific experiment by logging on to my works web based email and counted the amount of hits generated whilst logging on. It took 15 just to open the inotes. I may check these mails 4 or 5 times a day, that would be approx 60 / 75 hits just checking mail. The reason i mentioned the other pieces of equipment requiring my log on is that I was asked to do this be management. This equipment is capable of accessing the internet and this traffic would register under my logon. Also, with my laptop being left unattended i could not be sure a third party has not used it to access the internet. Again, thanks for your time.

Hi, I hope that someone can offer me some advice. I am facing dismissal from work for viewing pornographic material in works time. I am currently suspended, and have not yet been disciplined. Although I have been informed verbally that a letter will be dispatch soon starting formal disciplinary proceedings. It started when a workmate was witnessed watching porn during works time on his company issued laptop. He was working alone on the day in question and no one else from the department was present. As part of the investigation the company suspended all 4 members of our department, leaving just the supervisor, and took all 4 laptops for investigation. The workmate was dealt with very swiftly, within the first week, and agreed to resign. After three weeks of investigations the company has informed me of its findings. These are; · Excess internet use · Having inappropriate images · Searching for porn using Google images. My explanations are as follows · Most of the systems used in our department are web based and my internet connection is running virtually all day. I often leave my laptop unattended whilst attending shop floor callouts, from anywhere between 10 minutes to an hour. During this time other people may have access to the laptop. My logon is sometimes used be others on different machines to allow them to use web based software. · On 20/12/10 I received a personnel email via Gmail to my private online email account which contained a PowerPoint presentation from a friend outside of the company. I opened the mail not aware of its contents as the email was headed, “Seasons Greetings Just click on the numbers”. The first slide in the presentation was an advent calendar which showed a cartoon of Father Christmas crashing his sledge. I assumed that the rest of the calendar would follow a similar content, i.e. funny Christmas cartoons. However, when I clicked on a date an inappropriate picture was revealed. I immediately deleted the presentation from the hard drive of the computer. I assumed that by deleting the presentation that I had removed all traces of it, as I had no wish to view, retain or distribute it further. · This is the one that I’m not sure about. They claim that they can tell that I was deliberately searching for pornographic images. I am certain that I didn’t but how can I prove it? They claim that by using Google images and running a mouse over an image that that image will be stored on my hard drive. I have used Google image search, but not for porn. Sorry for the long post. Having read some of the others posted here I believe someone will have some positive replies. Thanks for reading this and I look forward to your response.