Is Your Web Activity At Work Being Watched?

If you like to blog, visit your social network, or send personal emails at work, you may want to re-evaluate what you are doing. A new report now claims that almost 19% of companies have disciplined an employee for violating corporate policies that involve blogging and online forums. What's even worse is that 10% of companies have fired employees. These statistics have come from a recent survey by Forrester Consulting for Proofpoint, a messaging security company.

The report goes on further to state that almost 28% of all companies have terminated an employee for violating a company email policy. That number climbs even higher, to about 33% for firms that have over 20,000 employees.Nearly half of the companies surveyed reported having disciplined employees for the same e-mail policy violation.

Of course, since Proofpoint does sell email monitoring software, I am sure that their intent of evaluating and publicizing the data is to prove to companies how valuable it can be to track their employees to see if they happen to be breaking the rules while on the work clock.

I am sure that now you are wondering what percentage of companies admit to actually monitoring their workforce. Well, about 33% confirmed that they have an employed, dedicated staff that reads and analyzes the outbound email sent from computers within the company. If you are one of those people who occasionally send personal emails that become off-topic or even negative towards your employer or co-workers, these numbers may be enough to make you change your mind.

As far as how many companies were forced to turn over employee emails to a court or regulator, apparently 30% of those with 20,000 employees or more were required to do so. You don't happen to have anything embarrassing that you would mind having turned over to officials, do you?

If you are brave enough to try to find a way to workaround the monitoring process, you may want to check out Wired blog's coverage of this survey, which they say “polled 308 U.S. companies with more than 1,000 employees.” Their post discusses possible solutions to surfing the web privately and securely. We will leave that decision up to you though.

With Proofpoint trying to “prove a point” these numbers may climb even higher if more companies decide to implement employee monitoring solutions, which I am sure some will after seeing these results. Be sure to be careful while at work… you may be next to be watched!