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• CIO Insights

By Ben King, 24 July 2001 11:20

NEWS Britons have long stared across the channel and wondered at the liberal elan of their continental cousins, and even in cyberspace, it seems, the British upper lip is still 20 per cent stiffer. In silicon.com's survey of email user habits, the UK users came out as far more concerned about the threat from the web than their continental counterparts who read silicon.fr and silicon.de. Less than 10 per cent of German and French readers said their company has or would sack people for internet misuse, while 26 per cent of British readers said their companies would. Similarly, over 60 per cent of our UK readers said their companies have policies about internet and email abuse. In Germany, just over 50 per cent of companies have an internet abuse policy and just under 40 have a policy for email, with almost identical figures for France. This is not because our continental cousins are more responsible than us - just under 20 per cent said they had looked at pornographic material at work, and around 12 per cent said they had sent saucy pictures to others from work. silicon.de decided to spare readers' blushes and didn't include this question in the survey. Workaholic UK users were the most enthusiastic about the idea of 'no-email Fridays', where staff keep their noses to the grindstone unhindered by the tide of jokes, games, pictures and other distractions that swill through cyberspace as the weekend approaches. While 33 per cent of UK respondents approved this as an excellent idea, only 22.2 per cent of German respondents would welcome the idea. The idea of a Vendredi sans mail also seems to make little sense in the land where the Vendredi sans travail is already a well-established tradition - just 24.9 per cent of French silicon readers gave it the thumbs up. UK users may try and comfort themselves by claiming that we have been using the internet for longer, or we're more exposed to US habits, so we're more aware of the dangers - but that argument hardly stands up. On most other questions, the answers from mainland Europe were almost identical, so the UK can hardly claim to be more "email savvy". By most measures, email usage across the three countries seems fairly uniform. To visit silicon.com's Digital Blunders site and find out just how wrong you can go with a simple email, visit http://www.silicon.com/digitalblunders where you will find stories like this one: "When I was getting divorced, my now ex-wife sent me an email telling me she couldn't afford to live in our flat and therefore wanted me to buy her out. I forwarded this to a mate, adding the comment: "Fantastic, the flat is going to turn into a Grade A bachelor pad, let's start pulling cheap sluts," and unfortunately copied her in the reply." For more email confessions, visit http://www.silicon.com/digitalblunders