As we become a less and less private society, helped by the web, data breaches, and the like, the question actually should be raised: is anything really private any longer? Certainly, based on Proofpoint's fifth annual report on Outbound Email Security and Data Loss Prevention, you shouldn't be expecting any privacy in your work email as 41 percent of large U.S. corporations monitor employee email.
In fact, 41% of large corporations (20,000 or more employees) have employees whose who monitor and read employee email (including their own, I assume). And 22% of large corporations have employees whose sole or primary task is email monitoring.
Other interesting (or scary, depending on how you look at it) information from the study and a press release issued by Proofpoint:
* 40% of companies surveyed investigated an email-based violation of privacy or data protection regulations in the past 12 months.
* 26% of companies surveyed terminated an employee for violating email policies in the last 12 months.
* 23% of U.S. companies surveyed said their business was impacted by the exposure of sensitive or embarrassing information in the last 12 months.
* 34% of the largest companies (20,000 employees or more) reported that employee email was subpoenaed in the last 12 months.
Although the monitoring of email was what caught my eye, companies are also interested in other possible points of data leakage:
* 27% of companies surveyed had investigated the exposure of confidential, sensitive or private information from lost or stolen mobile devices in the past 12 months.
* 11% of U.S. companies surveyed disciplined employees for improper use of blogs/message boards in the past 12 months.
* 13% of surveyed companies disciplined employees for social network violations and 14% for improper use of media sharing sites in the past 12 months.
* * 14% of publicly traded companies surveyed had investigated the exposure of material financial information (such as unannounced financial results) on blogs or message board postings in the last 12 months.
Proofpoint surveyed 301 email decision makers at U.S. companies with more than 1000 employees for this report.
Time to start using Gmail at work for your personal email? ... not that you should even be using company resources for personal email anyway, right?
Source: By Tech Ex - http://technologyexpert.blogspot.com/
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