“Accidentally Googled ‘Revenge Porn’ at Work – Could it Get Me in Trouble? 🤔🇨🇦
Hey there! So, I was at work today and ended up searching for the term ‘revenge porn’ to show a friend the correct term. I closed the tab right after. I work at a Canadian university and the vibe is pretty chill, but I’m worried this search might cause issues. How serious is this situation, really? Let me know! #WorkSearch #RevengePorn #Canada #InvestigationConcerns”
What Happened
I unintentionally Googled ‘revenge porn’ at work to clarify the correct term, closing the tab immediately after.
Work Environment
I’m a university staff member in Canada with a relaxed atmosphere and minimal monitoring.
Concerns
Could this search trigger an alert or investigation leading to disciplinary action?
Request
Your insights on the seriousness of this situation would be greatly appreciated!
Alternatively, do you want to work in an environment where something like this would be punished severely?
There’s usually much bigger problems for IT to be worried about
We can see, we don’t care.
Your security dept would be the ones to see it flagged, and they are generally more concerned about security issues.
You should be good.
Just do not do things like that at work.
Many simple word searches can pull up some NSFW sites as terms get reused and used to mean other things.
As long as it is not a habit I doubt it will be an issue.
How sensitive?
My answer to OPs question is..
Drum roll.. tatatatattatatata. NO..
TLDR: NO.
I think you’re overthinking
I work in IT. We don’t care or monitor that stuff. We have bigger fish to fry.
Nah you’re good.
Trust me, your IT department can barely keep on top of their own emails let alone monitor your traffic.
I hope that you are not working for a Bank/Healthcare. Your every activity will be monitored.
You’re fine.
I once torrented a shitload of movies on my work computer, got a bunch of viruses and basically destroyed it. Took it to IT and they just gave me a new one.
You’ll be fine
No, no one will even notice. Even if they did, it would take more than one search one time for anyone to do anything about it.
nothing to worry about
I accidentally mistyped hotels. com as hotles. com on my work computer once. I was kind of worried for a minute.
It is highly unlikely that anyone has time to be monitoring individual search terms from staff members, nor is it all that weird in the context of an academic environment. If ever there was a user base that had legitimate reasons to have some oddball search terms that sound kind of bad out of context it would be that. If it was really such a problem whatever problematic websites would blocked by whatever tool the network admins are using for such things anyway. The morality police is not going to go beating down your door demanding your resignation lol
It’s only serious if they actually care enough to look it up. Can you go into your computer history and more detailed history to delete it? This is why I like vpn mode can’t track cra–p like this.
One time I Googled “Dicks” looking for the sporting goods store. I didn’t realize that could have been bad until I saw all the Dick’s Sporting Goods signs in the results
You looked up a concept. Why on earth you be reprimanded for that? You have absolutely nothing to worry about. There’s revenge porn in the news, sociological research, legal changes, television documentaries and so on. There’s absolutely no reason on earth you’d get in trouble for this. Even if you did, you have ample excuse.
We block shit in a corporate environment you wouldn’t fucking believe.
There is a construction company who used the acronym BWC in my area. I work in property management and needed to find their number so I Googled ‘BWC’. I realized my mistake the moment the results came back.
You’re going to prison for ten years and will be forced to eat spiders every day.
Generally, most systems won’t even flag until you get five consecutive things within a given time frame. If you never clicked on anything outside the initial Google search those don’t even register. People worry about the internet Gestapo, but unless there is a complaint, nobody is going to look it up.
Nah. You just googled a term. Now if you went on pornhub or something, then I’d be worried but you’re fine
No, don’t worry about it. Nobody has time to sit and monitor all this stuff, and unless you were accessing naughty websites (which I’d guess are blocked anyway), all you did was look up an important social phenomenon so I wouldn’t get too bothered.
Don’t worry I’m sure there’s a lot of perverts on the university staff who are searching the same thing or worse.
IT has more to worry about than what one user searched one time. If someone even noticed it’ll probably go “heh, some jackass discovered the block. …revenge porn, weirdo”
That’ll likely be it unless it looks like you’re repeatedly trying and looking to get around it.
If you just Googled the phrase, I wouldn’t be too worried. Especially if there’s no additional related Internet activity beyond that. You could simply say that you weren’t familiar with the concept and looked it up really quick until it occurred might not be a god idea to do it on a work computer. And that’s more or less the truth.
Definitely do not double down or do anything else, as some people are suggesting, to somehow make this seem more legit. Right now, you still have a lot of plausible deniability. But if you do more, you’ll just be building a web of lies when the truth is currently your best defense.
But this is probably much ado about nothing. The truth is, most organizations, especially universities, do not have the IT bandwidth to actively monitor the Internet utilization of employees. In my experience, it’s usually only something that they would start doing in response to suspicion of an individual, or a legitimate need. Unless there’s some sort of government or provincial-level mandate or policy (assuming it’s a provincial and not a private school) I would be very surprised if they were actively monitoring Internet usage of all university computers at all times.
Generally speaking, IT departments don’t care. It’s also extremely unlikely they have a keylogger, so if you Googled the term, it was probably sent through HTTPS and thus, it’s encrypted.
There may or may not be some sort of record that they will keep for a predetermined amount of time, but if there’s no reason to conduct an investigation, no one will even know.
You have nothing to worry about, but I wouldn’t use university property to do personal anything from now on. This includes your phone if you’re connected to their WIFI. That way you’ll never have anything to worry.
Search up “revenge porn how to prevent” or “revenge porn statistics” in Google that way you don’t come across on the wrong side if they question you. This is more understandable than what you mentioned.
When did you do it?