About

Fifty notes on acceptable use policies and company equipment, written about enforcement rather than about drafting.

Who it is for

Whoever owns the document and is answerable for it: an IT lead, an operations manager, somebody in HR. Not a lawyer.

The position

The applied rule is the policy. What is written is a description that may or may not be accurate, and the staff have already worked out which parts are which.

An unenforced clause is not harmless. It discounts the live clauses around it and becomes a liability the moment somebody tries to use one.

A document cannot prevent anything. Prevention is configuration.

And most breaches are workarounds, which makes the commonest finding operational rather than personal.

What it does not argue

That policies are useless, or that rules should be loose.

That enforcement is unkind — the opposite. A few rules applied consistently is fairer than forty applied at the discretion of whoever is annoyed.

What is deliberately absent

Product, platform and vendor names.

Figures for rates of misuse, because those come from people selling monitoring tools.

And anything about evading a policy, which is not what this is for.

Nothing here is legal advice

Disciplinary and employment rules differ substantially by jurisdiction, and the enforcement questions in particular require local advice.

About this domain

This address previously belonged to an international trade show, which continues to run. There is a page about that.