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 employee monitoring software 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 employee monitoring software such as Social Sentry akin to the covert recording of washroom conversations? (Author: Rhonda Callow)
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