US Firms Read Employee E-mail On a Massive Scale 263
An anonymous reader writes "In its fifth annual study of outbound e-mail and data loss prevention issues, Proofpoint found that 41% of the largest companies surveyed (those with 20,000 or more employees) reported that they employ staff to read or otherwise analyze the contents of outbound e-mail. 22% of these companies said they employ staff primarily or exclusively for this purpose."
No hidden agenda here (Score:5, Insightful)
It may be just me, but I get really suspicious when a company in any business sponsors a survey and then uses the results to justify their own existence.
Is this surprising? (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't use your work email for personal stuff. It was never a good idea, and it's becoming ever less of a good idea. Don't say anything in an email that you wouldn't say in person or in writing. Be professional.
Also, don't forward chain letters, don't send around forwards of kitten pictures, pr0n, jokes, political screeds, etc. etc. Most people don't want to get it and you're wasting bandwidth.
Your rights? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not work monitor emails that bugs me. (Score:1, Insightful)
"Otherwise analyze" (Score:5, Insightful)
I would imagine that that breaks down to 100% running scanners against email and maybe looking at flagged messages and 0% routine reading of email.
Given the tedium of slogging through just my own email, you couldn't pay me to spend all day doing that for other people.
don't use work email for anything personal (Score:4, Insightful)
wow, talk about a non-issue.
Re:Surprise? Nope. I had a boss, once... (Score:5, Insightful)
Should this surprise anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's a waste of money. (Score:5, Insightful)
If they are disclosing that they monitor your use of their resources, you can choose if you are willing to put up with it or not.
Re:Is this surprising? (Score:5, Insightful)
Personal emails should only ever be sent from personal email accounts. That's just common sense.
After all, how dumb is it to put personal information into a system that is likely to see it archived for years in a system you are unlikely to have any control over.
Work email should be just for that, work. Just saying that won't work though, people, especially people who use computers, act with some kind of weird collective stupidity at times that can cause even the most sensible people to do and say things they would never do otherwise.
Better to monitor and make sure everyone follows the rules then have an email from your company showing up on the Internet saying something you would never condone.
Before any 'ooh, I've read 1984 so I am an expert on surveillance societies' morons chip in, I'm talking about the cold hard reality of business here. One wrong word can send stock prices through the floor.
Re:Your rights? (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree with you. Also, it doesn't even have to be like that.
I see it like writing a letter and using company letterhead - only it's a domain for email. Your correspondence can imply that it's part of the business of the company you're sending it from. Now, I know someone is going to write, "So, if I send an email from my Yahoo! mail account it implies that I'm doing Yahoo! business?!"
No. That's not what I'm saying. If I'm at my place of employment and send an email to someone that may be inflammatory, offensive, threatening, or whatever, someone can come back and say, "Hey, what's this? Someone at XYZ Inc. is threatening folks?!?"
Pidgin + OTR for *TOP SECRET* stuff (Score:2, Insightful)
Even with that policy though, when I chat with my wife or friends when I'm at work, I use Off The Record to encrypt my conversations.
It helps that my wife and brother Adium which already had it installed, and that I use a Linux at work which has packages in the repository.
And when I do send emails from work it's from Gmail, and always with https.
I figure that the work email is for work stuff, and they can monitor their business stuff all they want. For my personal stuff, it's personal and I'm not going to give them the chance.
Re:Secure your email (Score:5, Insightful)
Small companies? One admin who does email in addition to everything else. Mid-sized companies? There's prolly one, maybe two dedicated admins, and they're more interested in using your emails as a means to track SMTP problems than in reading what's in 'em.
Large corps? Heh - you're just begging for attention if you start flinging around abnormal-looking SMTP traffic; esp. in really big companies that get a touch paranoid about such things as corporate espionage.
You'd be better off risking the attention of the proxy-minders with webmail than by dicking around with encryption on your email client. Using the proggies you linked to also tends to stick up like a sore thumb in any workstation app auditing... and you could conceivably get fired faster for loading unauthorized software onto your corp-issued equipment than a quickie email to your girlfriend describing in graphic detail at what you want to do to her when you get home.
Besides, most email admins have better things to do than grep emails (e.g. battle spam, figure out and fix bounces from remote mis-configured servers, curse at Verizon's RFP-non-compliant configs, keep enough inodes handy in /var, pound the load averages down to something sane, beg the powers-that-be for decent equipment, etc).
Unless your corp specifically has good reason to be ultra-anal about security (e.g. gov't contractors, Microsoft/Intel/IBM-sized corps, etc), then monitoring user emails with anything beyond simple log and traffic grepping tools is a waste of resources and time. Any company that spends more time watching their employees than their customers is a company that isn't long for the world these days.
Re:Surprise? Nope. I had a boss, once... (Score:4, Insightful)
I also have to point out that the people who do actual work are the ones impacted by this sort of bullshit. Executives don't get disciplined/fired for sending a three-line email to their spouses unless one of the other executives wants them gone for some reason.
Re:Secure your email (Score:5, Insightful)
Large corps? Heh - you're just begging for attention if you start flinging around abnormal-looking SMTP traffic; esp. in really big companies that get a touch paranoid about such things as corporate espionage.
There is an implied point here that deserves highlighting.
The people who are employed specifically to analyse outgoing mail, aren't looking for you emailing your girlfriend during working hours, forwarding chain letters, or calling your boss names. They're looking for the folks whose "inappropriate" mail will cost the company big $$$$ - corporate espionage, sexual harassment, etc.
Most people will never be in position to be monitored thus, because they'll just never be "important" enough.
Overzealous much? (Score:2, Insightful)
Any company that feels the need to monitor their employees that closely without a really compelling need is not going to last long. (I define compelling need as something on the order of national security, building weapons systems, guarding highly valuable financial assets, or similar activities) If they can't ask you for results and trust you to go get them, that isn't a working relationship that is going to be productive.
Employers should be reasonable (Score:4, Insightful)
I always told my employees that as long as they got their work done with good quality and on time, we would get along just fine. If they abused that trust they might get a warning but only once. And you know what? It worked. I've had very little turnover and high morale and my employees really worked hard. Sending a few innocuous emails to a significant other doesn't qualify as a breach of trust. Looking at porn in the workplace would be a firing offense. It's really all about what is reasonable.
the movie Brazil - Ahead of its time? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Your rights? (Score:4, Insightful)
The company can solve this problem by making sure that it doesn't block web mail sites. After all, the problem is the domain name right?
Re:Employers should be reasonable (Score:4, Insightful)
What does this mean for employees? Develop expertise. If your skills are in reasonably high demand, and you can't be easily replaced, the power weighs heavily on the side of the employee.
Re:Employers should be reasonable (Score:4, Insightful)
The employer/employee relationship is not equitable only if you let it be that way. They need something done and are offering you compensation to do it. That's a fair trade. If the company is not offering fair compensation in reasonable working conditions then don't take the job. Yes, sometimes you'll run into some assclown running the show. Move on as soon as circumstances allow. It's a big world and life is too short to spend it working for jerks.
Re:Get back to work! (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, Tor and/or encryption.
Re:Believe it or not, you asked for it (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Get back to work! (Score:2, Insightful)
And that's doubly true given that you can't force people to be creative - if they're burnt out, they're burnt out, end of story. It's better to allow them to recharge and relax a bit than it is to drive them on with the (metaphorical) whip - you're not going to get anywhere, anyway.
Ever wonder why Google is so successful? Here's a hint: corporate culture and motivation.
Shopping for a new job (Score:1, Insightful)
re: personal email at work (and alternatives) (Score:4, Insightful)
Some employees don't even have a home computer with Internet access, so all their friends start sending their "funny photos", jokes, and so forth to the only contact address they can find for the person - the work email.
You *could* "blacklist" those people from sending you things, but come on! These are the employee's friends or relatives. They really don't want to block everything they might send them, because sometimes it's relevant or useful.
re: email filtering and archiving (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems to me that practically all of the issues you're bringing up could be handled successfully by retaining good email backups, going back for a reasonable length of time?
Our company doesn't do anything special in the way of attempting to read employee's emails or filter their content. But we DO have backup systems that dump copies of all the mailboxes onto nightly backups, and we keep a couple alternating "month end" tapes, plus a "year end" tape that's archived away.
This way, if something actually comes up, there's a decent amount of supporting email evidence that can be retrieved for that specific situation.
Otherwise, employees have a general expectation that nobody's monitoring their daily email correspondence in a "big brother" fashion.
Not even Google would allow "special" browsing ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Note that the original poster wrote 'I stopped "special" surfing at the office'. There is a pretty high probability that this is referring to porn. Tolerating employees visiting porn sites is one way a company can get sued. Of course while the solution described in this article is cool and amusing, it is probably another way to get a company sued.
Ever wonder why Google is so successful?
Inertia mostly. They had a brilliant idea a while ago and have refined it since then to maintain competitiveness. Google has done many cool things since then but they are mostly a drain on success or neutral, some mild successes, but no big successes outside the original domain. Also, it is doubtful Google allows employees to browse porn sites either. With their deep pockets their fears regarding law suits are going to be pretty high.
Clue: "Law of Small Numbers", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasty_generalization [wikipedia.org].
Now at least one element of Google culture, allowing employees the time to work on pet projects that many benefit the company, may have a proven track record. 3M allowed this for decades and many useful products emerged. Google may follow 3M's lead, but it is a little early to pass judgement.
Re:Secure your email (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Google loves HTTPS (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Gmail provides HTTPS (Score:2, Insightful)
The concept of network security is about as effective as the concept of airport security.
Raises the question... (Score:3, Insightful)
But some companies might be better off putting that kind of effort into quality control on the *products* they send out, rather than correspondence.
Re:Employers should be reasonable (Score:3, Insightful)
In that job, the owner was easily the most arrogant, foul-mouthed jerk I have ever met in my life, with the possible exception of his father, who showed up around the office from time to time. During my tenure there, I watched at least two other employees get fired because the owner found out they were looking for other jobs -- "if you don't want to work here, I don't want you working here," was his reasoning -- and three employees get fired for other reasons. That may not seem like much, until you realize that there were never more than 12 people working at this company at any one time.
When I finally moved on to greener pastures, I realized how much I had narrowed my own options while working there, and how much happier I was once I was employed somewhere else.
Trust me -- if you have any marketable skills at all, you can and will find another job. It might get a little tight for a while, but no job is worth the stress of such a crappy working environment.
Hostile work environment... (Score:3, Insightful)