Businesses Struggle To Control Social Networking

Lucas123 writes "Businesses in highly regulated industries are trying to strike a balance between workers who use social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to communicate, and trying to satisfy federal requirements to monitor, capture, and audit all forms of electronic communications. As with instant messaging a decade ago, corporations are first blocking all access to the applications, and then considering what tools may be available to control them in the future. A cottage industry is being built around software that can not only control access to social networking websites but also ensure conversations over those websites can be stored for electronic discovery purposes."

Comments

Why not block them entirely?

[eviloverlordx]

Aren't these people supposed to be, you know, working?

Re:Why not block them entirely?

[the1337g33k]

Exactly, thats what I do. The company pays people to work, not play farmville.

Re:Why not block them entirely?

[andrewd18]

Or post on Slashdot.

Re:Why not block them entirely?

[swanzilla]

Aren't these people supposed to be, you know, working?

There exist lines of work that both require access to social media sites, and require capture/reporting of said access.

RFTA. It is quite interesting.

Re:Why not block them entirely?

[Captain Splendid]

The company pays people to work, not play farmville.

Then the company is stupid. We have decades' worth of scientific and anecdotal evidence that putting human monkeys in tight little boxes is Not A Good Thing, both for the monkey and the maker of the box.

My employees have two rules to follow: 1. Get the job done. 2. Don't embarrass the company. Compliance with them ensure a wide variety of perks and other 'human' touches which both they and I appreciate. Anything not covered by the two rules is already small potatoes and not worth pulling your hair out. Everybody wins.

Disclaimer: This management method looks like it would be a bitch to scale. Not my fucking problem, thank Cthulu.

Re:Why not block them entirely?

[Captain Splendid]

Some interesting points there. Shame that advocating breaking up successful companies in order to maximize employee contentment (and, perhaps, productivity and other 'useful' things) would make an MBA have a heart attack.

Old tangible vs. intangible model.

[JustinOpinion]

Hm. I wonder if we perhaps need to rethink the difference between communication and documentation. The current rule seems to be that in regulated industries, any electronic document is subject to documentation/retention requirements. However this comes from an old model, where documents were somehow "official". So things like face-to-face conversations, or telephone calls, were not required to be recorded and archived. But anything written on paper was supposed to be archived to create a paper-trail, and because these were the "official documents".

In a modern world, some electronic documents (PDFs, word processor documents, emails, etc.) have taken the place of "official paper documents", and other electronic communications (instant messaging, social networking sites, etc.) have taken the place of the less-formal communication modes. (Obviously phones and face-to-face conversations still exist, also.)

On the one hand, it seems like the more documentation we can retain in regulated industries, the better off we are. (In case of negligence or malfeasance, it makes it possible to assign blame, bring people to justice, avoid repeating mistakes, etc.) On the other hand, as long as we are allowing some communication modes to be informal or undocumented, then allowing other modes that are also undocumented doesn't seem to change much. (People who want to have secret conversations will surely find a way to do it.)

I'm not sure what the right answer is. But I'm not convinced that making all electronic modes of communication subject to the same level of recording/documentation/archiving really makes sense.

Re:Old tangible vs. intangible model.

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that in a regulated industry (in all industries, actually), there is no such thing as a communication that is not "official." If one of your agents makes a representation, and one of your stakeholders acts on that representation, then you are responsible for it. It doesn't matter how that representation was communicated. Whether or not the document was stamped "official" or not is irrelevant.

What's happening now is that firms are given the tools for rapid and wide communication, and they are coming up against the same old problems of information leakage and people saying things that they shouldn't. But unlike the old days when such things were just verbal and impossible to capture, now they are persistent and can be automatically captured.

iPhones and Androids and HTC Heros, Oh My

[Darth Sdlavrot]

Stockbrokers with smartphones. Ain't going to stop 'em.

Until the first lawsuit.

[khasim]

The reason for the documention (and control that such requires) is to keep the company on the right side of the law.

Being able to show the EXACT communication that took place can save a lot of money in fines.

Re:HTTP over SOCKS over SSH over SSL thankyouverym

[BitZtream]

If you think you're special because you can do that to get around a block then you are confused. If you can use this sort of workaround then your admins are either idiots or don't actually want to stop you, they just want you to go out of your way enough that its obvious you were breaking the rules.

Either way, you aren't special.