Can you imagine a place where you can talk to friends without a chaperon or tend to personal business without permission? I can. I call it Hunters Creek Elementary School, But for many others called the Office. Sad but true: Millions of workers have had access to personal email and social networking sites cut.
Most companies monitor email communications, but did you know that almost half of these companies completely restrict employee access to e electronic popular social networking sites such as Gmail, Hotmail, Facebook and MySpace? There's a good chance he knows from personal experience … are not alone. As bee a former employee of a company that may relate to the frustration shared by millions of people who were blocked from personal email and messages of social networks in the workplace.
Not all companies are bad, so why do so many outside employees access to the block of accounts messaging when it is clearly an unpopular policy? The answer may surprise you because "productivity" is not the reason. Most mail corporate mail and Internet policies are based on safety, legal liability and regulatory issues. Indeed, the decision to restrict the Access is a prudent business practice.
Let's look at security issues first. Unrestricted access to foreign accounts Messaging enterprise computing systems exposed to the threat of viruses and other unwanted intrusions. It only takes one erroneous discharge from the inactivation of a single computer or even worse, an entire network. Even with the best in-class anti-virus applications, protecting computers from downloads of the web is difficult and violations occur all time. The end result is the cost, time and lost productivity associated with the repair or replacement of an infected computer is high and the ROI on granting employee access to personal messages is low.
So what legal obligations? Sadly, we live in a society issue, and a message sent from the offensive team an employee can lead the company to be sued. Moreover, it is difficult and expensive to monitor external messaging accounts in real time, any employee may voluntarily or unwittingly send confidential or proprietary information without the company knowing. Think about the scenario when an analyst Financial sends a message to a friend about a new agreement being worked. It seems harmless, but in truth, that the employee has just passed on inside information and may result in claims from investors, government fines and even criminal charges. For now, the company finds out, the damage is done. Although cases like this are rare, occur and many companies are unwilling to take the risk just to keep their employees connected.
This leads to the following factor: government regulation. There are many laws and governmental regulation of corporate email security, privacy and retention practices documents. At least eight federal agencies and numerous state agencies have the authority to enforce these laws, including: Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, SEC Rule 17A, NASD Rules 3010 and 3110, the USA Patriot Act and the Cyber Security Enhancement Act of 2002. The legal landscape for messaging online is complicated and clear, however, the fines for violating these rules can be strong. In February 2006, Morgan Stanley was fined $ 15 million to U.S. security and Exchange Commission for lack of adequate retain emails, and there are many similar examples.
The struggle for the right e-mail is relatively new, many of the laws governing e-mail is just adopted by the last ten years. However, most experts believe that the outlook will become increasingly restrictive and more liberal even companies, will soon become more prohibitive with its Internet policy. And the timing could not be worse. As technology intelligent representation in the Generation Y workforce set grows, the conflict will deepen. These young, well-connected technical life is very difficult without high-speed access to their online communities, and messages. However, in the fight of David against Goliath, between employees and employers, Goliath usually wins. So what is a well-connected worker bee to do?
Mark Schmulen is the author of http://www.GettheNut.com and a co-founder of http://www.NutshellMail.com
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