Who's Watching Who?

So you send a friendly email to a colleague, a friend, a relative a competitor. The question you must ask is whether anyone is watching and monitoring your emails. Sounds very 1984 but outlaw.com report that Email security company Proofpoint have claimed that almost 40% of companies who have more than 1,000 staff employ someone whose job is to monitor the outgoing email of colleagues.

The survey of some 220 companies involved interviews with their email chiefs and found in increase of some 9% in monitoring activity over their previous survey in 2008.

Email isn’t the only communications problem with 18% of the companies having conducted an investigation into employees' use or blogs or message boards. 17% had disciplined an employee for breaking company rules on their use and 9% had resulted in staff being fired over blog and message board.

So what’s your company policy on internet usage and is it linked to a disciplinary policy? How much time do employees spent surfing, emailing, twittering and what do they communicate? Its too easy to slip into 1984.