NetNanny CEO Advocates 'No-Porn Policy' in the Workplace

LOS ANGELES—Net Nanny is supposed to be a tool used by parents to filter content they don’t want their children to see, but now the software company seems to want to expand its reach not only to adults, but also into your workplace. It’s all for your own good, however, so fear not. It’s not they’re advocating for more restrictive workplace rules or anything. Oh, wait; yes, they are. And they aren’t even being subtle about it. A Huffington Post article posted Thursday afternoon in the Business section by Russ Warner, a software entrepreneur and the CEO of Net Nanny parent ContentWatch, makes its case rather unambiguously in the blanket headline, “Organizations should institute a No-Porn Policy.” By that, he means they should also incoporate porn filters. To support his censorial desires, Warner employs a litany of arguments that range from the reasonable to the ridiculous. Most reasonable, of course, is the simple and pretty universal concept that employers want their employees to focus on the job at hand. There are not too many arguments that can effectively counter that one. But when Warner starts railing about lost productivity and increased threats of sexual harassment and violations of “workplace boundaries,” he doth protest too much, and weakly. He also shamefully quotes from a self-professed “recovering” porn addict, who also happened to write a book on the subject, and appears on places like CNBC, where he warns the nation that, “For a porn devotee, almost everything else takes a back seat." How convenient. The problem is, actual facts used by Warner are few and unconvincing. First, he cites Nielsen as having found that “25 percent of working adults admit to looking at pornography on a computer at work. And 70 percent of all online pornography access occurs between 9 AM and 5 PM. It's clear that workplace porn viewing is a common occurrence.” First, both sets of facts are so broad as to be virtually useless in terms of the conclusion made by Warner. But even if the 25 percent claim is accurate, advocating blanket workplace policies to address the alleged behavior of a minority of employees is a tad cheeky. In fact, at many workplaces where intensive investigations have been undertaken to discover the extent of porn use violations—such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)—the results almost always show that it is a relatively miniscule percentage of employees that account for the targeted behavior. With the SEC, it turned out to be less than 1 percent of the agency's 3,500 employees who were involved in the porn viewing during work. In many of these cases, it’s actually just a few bad apples that account for most of the prohibited behavior. That said, at some workplaces, like the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency, one actually would prefer that not one person’s attention was being diverted by porn. Still, Warner’s most comprehensive claim that, “Pornography cannot exist in the workplace if high levels of productivity are desired,” reeks of self-serving overkill. At AVN, a smaller staff in the aftermath of the recession has not resulted in a reduction in individual productivity. To the contrary! And we get to look at the stuff all day long. In fact, our experience lends credence to the idea that workplaces around the world would actually benefit from allowing more porn viewing at work, judging individuals based on actual productivity and then penalizing those whose productivity falls short. At any rate, it seems much fairer than Warner’s way, where the majority has to suffer along with a miniscule and undisciplined minority. This is not to diminish Warner’s effort on behalf of his company’s sales. He’ll probably make some from the article. But porners have to live, too, and truth be told, those daytime porn watching stats are pretty darn accurate. Image: Co-workers sharing a laugh about Net Nanny's suggested no-porn policy.