Is it okay for your employer to monitor your Facebook & Twitter accounts?
Is your boss watching what you do on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks?
Big Brother is watching you. Or, more accurately, he’s watching your Facebook, Twitter and other social networking accounts. Mountain View-based company Teneros recently released a new product called Social Sentry that enables companies to discover and monitor their employees’ social network accounts.
You may be saying, so what? Your boss can already look at whatever information you choose to make publicly available on social network, so what’s the big deal? Well, what some people may consider to be a big deal is that Social Sentry will make it easier than ever before for your boss to keep tabs on you. From the product’s data sheet:
Social Sentry provides automatic detection of employee social networking presence, even if employees are using personal aliases for communication. It provides the ability to record, and archive, all of the monitored communications and content, whether for a single employee or a select set of employees based on risk assessment for legal and compliance issues.
In other words, Social Sentry will enable your employer to automatically discover and monitor your social networking accounts as they wish, when they wish. The product will only be able to monitor information that you’ve made available publicly, but it’s rules-based and so will enable your employer to be alerted whenever you post specific words or terms – your employer’s name, a product name, or the name of a competitor, for example.
In some way, Social Sentry may be no bad thing – especially if it helps to identify people like the Nanaimo RCMP officer who Facebooked, “Night shift and St. Paddy’s Day, can’t wait to drop kick all the drunk idiots,” and, “How come every chick I arrest lately refuses to put clothes on and they’re the ones you never want to see naked.” On the other hand, do you really want your boss to get an email notification that you’ve been badmouthing a colleague or bellyaching about your hours or pay? Or that you’ve been exchanging tweets with a competitor’s recruiting manager?
Yup, you can use privacy settings to restrict access to their social network accounts, but some people may be confused as to how to use those settings and find that they are publicly disclosing information that they did not expect to be disclosed, as illustrated by the recent controversy about Google Buzz.
What do you think about this? Is information that’s posted publicly fair game? Or is the use of an application such as Social Sentry akin to the covert recording of washroom conversations?
Why is it that anyone thinks that anything they post on the internet is private? If you’ve stupidly posted something for the world to see, you don’t get to be upset at who sees it.
If it’s publically available online, then it’s probably unreasonable to say employers can’t or shouldn’t be allowed to view it – even with this sort of helper application.
However, one could hope they might have better things to do with their time than following their employees’ every move online. An employer like that is perhaps not one you ought to be working for.
Maybe Twitter and Facebook shouldn’t be places where we can vent about stuff from work; maybe we should only vent about work things to people we can trust with our privacy: close friends. Internet and privacy do not go well together.
I agree with JP, however, if you are not Facebooking or Social Networking at work, if you use no company time, I would find this an unacceptable intrusion into my life. I only permit real friends to be Facebook “Friends,” not acquaintances, not friends of friends and certainly not employers.
If I understand this article, Social Sentry can by pass this. But only if I am doing social networking at work??
I think the thing to do is to keep your social media for your spare time, you are not paid to socialize. If my boss finds me Facebooking when I should be working, he should fire me, not monitor me!
[...] [Other sources: Sync Daily] [...]
[...] [Other sources: Sync Daily] [...]
just seems to be another example of employer spying and trying to control everyone who dosent tow company line.
No, Social Sentry cannot “see past” your privacy settings – it can only see and record what a stranger could see. The problem is that some people do not use the privacy settings (thinking that nobody would really be interested in what they post) while others do not understand how to use the settings. And it can be confusing. For example, when Bill posts something to Bob’s Facebook wall, is it Bill or Bob’s settings that effect who can see the post? While you and I probably know the answer to this, I suspect that there will be a bunch of people who do not and who may never have even thought too much about it.
Of course, this is a silly question! But it highlights how social networks have us all “hooked in” on not the real world!
If employees are socially connecting through Twitter or Facebook at WORK on an Employer’s time that means the Enployer’s work is not being done unless it’s a Web Master who is using the Internet or the Employer has asked the employee to do work on Twitter or Facebook.
Maybe people need to stop leaning on others using other people’s time and money to be popular and work for a living! Everyone cannot be “Lady Gaga” or get their 15 minutes by “outing someone else”. What is happening in our world, REALLY!
Can anyone translate “big brother” into Chinese?
I know it can be “独裁者”,”统治者”,etc, But I think they are not suitable to describe employer in Chinese.
Can you guys do me a favor to provide a more accurate word to describe employer in Chinese.
We monitor our employers’s Facebook chatting by Facebook Chat Monitor Sniffer.