By Jo Best, 19 July 2004 17:30
NEWS Large companies are now so concerned about the contents of the electronic communications leaving their offices that they're employing staff to read employees' outgoing emails.
According to research from Forrester Consulting, 44 per cent of large corporations in the US now pay someone to monitor and snoop on what's in the company's outgoing mail, with 48 per cent actually regularly auditing email content.
The Proofpoint-sponsored study found the motivation for the mail paranoia was mostly due to fears that employees were leaking confidential memos and other sensitive information, such as intellectual property or trade secrets, with 76 per cent of IT decision makers concerned about the former and 71 per cent concerned about the latter.
Porn and ropey jokes still figure on the list of concerns for execs, though, with 64 per cent admitting to worrying about "inappropriate content and attachments" on the emails.
What worries those in charge of tech most about their staff emails differs depending on the size of the business, the study found.
The smaller the enterprise, the more likely it was to worry more about attachments and less likely to be troubled by the possibility the email won't be up to compliance standards set by Sarbanes-Oxley and other legislation.
Understandably, with Basel II and similar looming, financial services was the vertical that is the most concerned with meeting compliance targets - as they should be, it appears. A survey of UK financial institutions found that around half would be unable to find an email over three years old; storing email is a key demand of the new legislation.
Comments
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1. anonymous
It will be interesting to see how British bosses will tackle the situation when their European staff start writing e-mails in languages other than English
2. Alex MacCaskill
Educating users about the company's policies and procedures, then
rewarding them financially for compliance is surely more likely to engender trust and cost less in the long run.
Our tools provide a quick means of doing this with minimum risk:
http://www.zapit.org
3. anonymous
I hope the staff they employ don't say a thing and can keep secrets... and are as trustworthy and honest as they should be, also loyalty comes into the equation.
4. Daddy Pays
You know what, my lazy wife could do this job. Anyone have any leads?
5. Marius Vincent
Errrr....
Why not use GPG/PGP ?
6. Lisa Harris
Employing individuals to "snoop" is certainly not within the spirit of the data commissioner's Code of Practice on monitoring! Have these "large companies" told their staff that this personalised monitoring is taking place? I suspect not...
7. Dilbert is dead, catbert lives!
Your Co-workers are already snooping, so why not your boss? With office politics being so cut throat these days, Snooping has become a well know tool, (even an advancement "edge") for technical employees for several years now. With the latest packet sniffers from colasoft and other companies ANYONE can read EVERYONES email without the need to have server access etc. Want to see what your boss is really saying about you? Want to brown nose you way to success or “leak” juicy info on your coworkers failures? Packet sniffers are now easy enough for a summer student to use, and he can do it from any PC connected to the corporate LAN.
The last person you should be worried about reading you email is you boss…. Your coworkers have been doing it for years, and its virtually undetectable!
8. Husband of a lazy ass wife
Yeah, but I'm keeping them so my lazy ass wife can try and get the job. But, she resuses to type, so I have to see if she can do this with dictation software.