I don't think it's made up, because I experienced the same thing in a pretty well-known European research center... Of course, had I known about these practice

I don't think it's made up, because I experienced the same thing in a pretty well-known European research center... Of course, had I known about these practices in advance, I would have declined the job offer. But I didn't. I ended up quitting a few weeks later anyway. IT would monitor all connections from all employees and send a report to upper management with summary statistics, on a monthly basis. I was told this was the case by a fellow worker during my second day there, so I tunneled my traffic through my home server via SSH. When IT asked me why I had zero HTTP requests, I reminded them that monitoring employees traffic was illegal under our current legislation. Doing this in a university-like non-profit research center is hard to justify.