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One-Third Of Companies Monitoring Email
dotpavan writes "While studies have shown that spying on workers tends to make them less productive, that hasn't stopped approximately 1/3 of all U.S. companies from employing email monitoring tools. 43% of those companies employ staff to check outgoing emails. This seems like quite a waste. While there are some times when it makes sense to monitor emails (or it's required by law), most of the time, this seems like a complete waste of money. Not only are you upsetting workers and decreasing productivity, the benefits are pretty hard to spot. The number of "problem" emails tends to be incredibly low. If someone really wants to send out inappropriate emails, they're going to figure out some other way to do so, such as via a free webmail account somewhere. Yet, the companies are buying up expensive tools and hiring staff to watch just in case they catch the one or two problematic emails that go over the corporate network."
Does that count companies like mine, that once bounced email back to me because I described a process as "sucking up all the CPU time", only to be told that 'suck' or 'sucking' is not allowed in our email?
You wouldn't consider hiring folks to monitor e-mail if your firm suffered public embarrassment or lost business due to leaked information. While I agree that it is sad that employers don't feel that they can trust their employees, I honestly cannot blame them.
At the magazine I edit, many of the department email address forward to me before they go to the department editors. Part of the reason is that some of the department editors can be, shall we say, less than diplomatic when dealing with incorrigible readers. Part of my job is to ensure that exchanges do not become denigrating or insulting, and to avoid lawsuits.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
What I find interesting is the distinction between email and phone use. It's illegal in many states -- may even be federal law for all I know -- to listen in on employee phone communication. Why doesn't email deserve this same protection?
Wouldn't work in my office. All webmail is banned. They don't want anyone downloading attachments because of the threat of viruses. Any incoming mail sent from outside the network is automatically stripped of its attachments by the corporate firewall.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
is that you can legally get access to the sent and recieved email of graduate students, faculty, and staff at state runs schools under some open information act. Yeah, it's happened in my department.
Dir Sir or Madaam: Your post has been rejected by our new email/post monitoring system. The reason for rejection is as follows:
Improper usage of "there," please replace the offending word with "their."
Good day, Your Corporate Email/Post Monitor
Error: Sig not found.
When your company is liable for the one or two problematic emails to the tune of millions of pounds, it starts to seem slightly less silly.
I worked for a company that was developing a software product for a single large customer. This customer is a very large technology company that had various factions in it that were for or against our product.
My boss who was the engineering VP had told everyone repeatedly to be very careful about the kind of emails to send to them.
The email that killed us was a "reply all" to a thread announcing that a build of our product that was available for evaluation. An engineer hit "reply all" and then proceeded to write a highly negative diatribe about the build. The reason why he did that was he was upset that he hadn't had time to put in a fix for some particular hardware configurations. Of course, we had months of development left in the project and his fix would have been in the next build. However, he did not state this very precisely, nor did he consider his audience.
The folks who did not like our product (because they percieved it to be a threat to their political power within the company) used his email to convince the CEO of the customer company to cancel our project.
I was in an "Oh Shit" meeting the next day with our CEO and the rest of senior management. Our CEO stated that he wanted to throw the engineer who sent the email off the roof of our building (which is maybe 25 floors). Ultimately this email lead to the layoff off of 130 out of 150 employees during the middle of the resession (November 2001) and ultimately the company limped along for another year before folding. Fortunately for me, I was positioned exactly right (politically) to be able to stay, but a lot of really good people lost jobs at the worst possible time.
If that email had *not* been sent, we might have hung on long enough to ship the product. If that had happened, it would have meant that the people in the "customer" company would havee been promoted, our company would have made some money and maybe been acquired. I'd probably still be working there.
That said, I have no problem with companies monitoring email.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
How is it your free speech to use your company's bandwidth and server time to send emails?
You can go home and do whatever you want on your own machine. When your working you are on the company payroll so if they don't like what you are doing you should stop.
Free speech is an important right but it has nothing to do with this discussion
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
"While studies have shown that spying on workers tends to make them less productive, that hasn't stopped approximately 1/3 of all U.S. companies from employing email monitoring tools. 43% of those companies employ staff to check outgoing emails.
The "study" referenced does not address eletronic monitoring of employees.
The paper is about trusting employees to work from home and other "remote" locations. Evidently, Microsoft doesn't feel that employers should feel the need to physically watch over their employees - perhaps because remote office work could be beneficial to Microsoft's bottom line.
To claim that this paper is an academic study referring to the negative aspects of corporate electronic monitoring is way off base. Instead, it smells like a Microsoft whitepaper promoting Microsoft products within UK employees' homes.
Whenever unions are brought up on Slashdot, they're usually in the context of low wages or long hours.
But here's another prime example of where some kind of union could prevent this kind of invasion of privacy (and waste of money). But without any kind of organization that can negotiate on the behalf of the employees, most workers just have to take it.
Now before the Libertarians get their briefs in a bunch, no, a corporation has no legal responsibility to respect the freedom of speech of it's employees. Yes, employees are free to find another job. But sometimes those excuses just aren't good enough.
"The folks who did not like our product (because they percieved it to be a threat to their political power within the company) used his email to convince the CEO of the customer company to cancel our project."
:), and they will use their own spin on every "fact" that they can. Trying to put blame on the poor guy/gal that sent a poorly thought-out e-mail rather than the evil people that scuttled the deal doesn't seem right.
Errr.... Yay team!???
This more or less indicates that your company had bigger problems than that e-mail. If people who want to destroy the company are in a position to do so, they will. Blaming a nasty, ugly situation on one person seems to disregard the fact that there were a number of people, and a fair amount of time invested in pushing the big red self-destruct button for your company.
Your post seems to blame the person without considering that there were a lot of other contributors to the situation than just this one person.
There are egomoniacal jerks with waaay more influence than is healthy in pretty much every company (at least in my experience
"Yet, the companies are buying up expensive tools and hiring staff to watch just in case they catch the one or two problematic emails that go over the corporate network."
I've worked for companies under investigation by the SEC for inappropriate behavior. Sometimes "one or two" emails is all it takes to break the law and cause a company's stock to plummet.
My current company 'buys up expensive tools' and 'hires extra staff' to run backups on the network, just in case one or two problematic hard drive failures occur. Why is it ok to monitor company hardware but not ok to monitor company communications?
A friend of mine used to work in the IT department of a major casino. Apparently all casinos have a huge database of everyone that plays, what they play, how often, etc.. This database is highly valuable to other casinos. I've heard that rival casinos will pay 10-20k for it.
So someone with access to it is about to sell it. Naturally all the email filters are in place and she was smart enough not to try that. So she figured she would just print it out and walk out with it. She got caught, however, when she called the IT department because the print server crashed. Apparently, sending a 10,000 page document to a print server doesn't quite work as well as one might hope.
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Squirrel
that hasn't stopped approximately 1/3 of all U.S. companies from employing email monitoring tools.
Why not link to the source for your source (login)? The ITFacts.biz story got it wrong anyway: "33% of US companies monitor employees' e-mail" is wrong--the direct quote was "Almost 33 percent of 140 North American businesses..." You and ITFacts were off wrt the number and the sample. Oh, and the Tribune article was merely a syndicated column, using data from a nearly year-old study. Not exactly news. Where did I find that out? Look, it's ITFacts.biz! Yep, TFA was a double post.
Let's continue because we are not done fixing your post:
43% of those companies employ staff to check outgoing emails.
Wrong. It's "more than 43%" of companies with over 20,000 employees (not 43% of monitoring companies), according to the study. The one-third figure expands the sample to include all companies.
It is also worth noting that the study in question was sponsored by ProofPoint, which in fact sells monitoring software. So you could say that Forrester had a financial interest in high-balling the figure (which it appears they did, with all this "almost 33%" business).
My company has restrictive policies as well. we aggressively monitor systems use, external phone calls, email and internet traffic. I can tell you they're worried about the wrong thing:
USB drives are what the babysitters should be shitting themselves over. How many companies have a huge list of staff in engineering and other sensitive areas with have local admin rights?. plug, play, cut, paste and you could see hundred sensitive documents go to your competition.
Lift a gigabyte of restricted documents no one will notice, but send an email with a rude word in it and you get counselled for "unnaceptable" conduct.
security concious? no. righteous and moral? yes. wrong focus for a business, I think.
http://request-header.info
I went to an orientation once for a big contracting firm and one of the managers had what I thought was a great way for everyone to think about using email at the office.
In a nutshell, he said people should think of using a company PC the way they already think about using a company office phone.
Nobody minds an occasional call( now email ) to take care of a small personal issue, but people do care if they spend if you spend all day on the phone ( email ).
By the same token, people in most jobs do not expect their office line to be tapped and the contents monitored.