Some firms have paid dearly for failing to prevent employees downloading offensive material on to company computers. Mobile communications company Orange and financial firm Merrill Lynch both recently sacked a number of call centre employees after discovering they had been downloading and emailing offensive material via company computer systems. Many firms install software on their systems to block such material, as had Orange, according to a spokeswoman for the company at the time of the scandal. This software resides on systems and prevents access to material it identifies as offensive either by keywords, if dealing with text, or by the amount of skin tone on display, if dealing with picture files like JPEGs. Such software would seem indispensable to businesses, but in reality it often oversteps the mark and blocks inoffensive material too.
Text blocking software, for example, comes with watchwords pre-installed.
But while it may recognise which words to block, it is often over-zealous. When 'sex' is blocked, so is 'Essex'. Picture-blocking programs are also problematic. At best, they have a success rate of about 90 percent. It is almost impossible to be right all of the time.