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63% Of Corporations Plan To Read Outbound Email
John writes "Aviran's place reports that a recent survey of 332 technology decision-makers at large U.S. companies reveals that more than 63% of corporations with 1,000 or more employees either employ or plan to hire workers to read outbound email, due to growing concern over sensitive information leaving the enterprise through email."
The funny thing is... well, not so much funny as it is disturbing, signing an employment contract.
Remember that signature on that thick paper you've signed prior getting that high paid tech job? The one saying that everything you think of during working hours is theirs? The one that maybe is saying (in some cases) that everything you think on and off during working hours, while employed or 3 years after also belongs to them?
Well, it seems to me, and I might be way off here, that thinking up an email by an employee is in fact his company's property and hence, they have all the rights to read it, and it doesn't breaks anyone's right to privacy.
Can anyone with legal experience enlighten me on this one? Do the bastards have the right to do so, provided that one doesn't sign a document that explicitly states "you can read my email" but instead contains a fine version of "all your bases, off lunch hours, belongs to us?
Who do they hire to read the outgoing emails of the people they hired to read outgoing emails?
This is so far ahead of it's time I just don't know what to say...
I can't send more than maybe one or two MB of data through my email.
But I can easily shove a 1GB USB stick up my ass and walk out past the guards.
For example if I include the name of one of my company's products plus "bug"/"flaw"/"crash" then I can expect a follow-up scolding from HR. (I found this out the hard way) Course that's cake compared to the other spying and practices that go on.
From: steve@apple.com
To: paul@intel.com
Subject: Execute Order 66
Dear Paul,
let's do it,
signed
Steve
Really. This wouldn't affect me in any way, because I never use work time for personal business, and I like my boss! He's so clever and intelligent.
A recent survey of 332 technology decision-makers at large u.s. companies reveals a growing concern over sensitive information leaving the enterprise through email and through USB memory sticks hidden in their employees ass.
In its 2005 study on outbound email security and content issues, email security vendor and ass searching expert Proofpoint found that more than 63% of corporations with 1,000 or more employees either employ or plan to hire workers to read outbound email and search their employees ass when they arrive and leave from work.
Tat Tvam Asi
>What's to stop employees from just logging into a private webmail account over HTTPS and sending information out that way?
Keystroke logging.
So if you're an employee who values privacy and wants to send a bit of private personal email once in a while on your personal web mail account (say, gmail), the only way to retain that privacy is to either do all that mail through a cell phone, or install an OS that the IT people don't have a keystroke logger for. Where I work all our computers have the corporate spyware installed from day one. To have privacy, you have to find some obscure Unix distro (Red Hat isn't obscure enough; they have that covered too) and use it.
...will begin reading their incoming e-mail.
My comments are my own, and do not represent the views of my employer, my spouse, my children, or my cats.
"you've no more expectation of privacy than you do on a CB channel."
Might as well go all PsyOps on their corporate asses then.
Have some outside dummy accounts you can send email to. Send messages full of glowing comments re: boss & company, and others that refer to a mysterious dark conspiracy that haunts your past. Something involving genetic experimentation, a mad European scientist, and a mysterious Brazilian clinic.
Then the week before you quit, start sending mysterious messages encoded in pig-Latin.
"The owls-nay are not as they eem-say."