New Software Allows Your Employer To Find and Track Your Social Media Activity

If you post information on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, an argument could be made that you have given up any expectation of privacy. It’s like talking over a loud speaker everywhere you go – everyone can hear you, and you know that. But even knowing that, this seems a little creepy to me. A company called Teneros has developed a software solution called Social Sentry that will give employers a look behind the curtain at their employee’s activities on social networks, ostensibly to eliminate corporate risks related to compliance, leakage of sensitive information, HR issues, legal exposure and brand damage – but they will be seeing, and recording, everything else you happen to post online.

According to Teneros:

Existing investments in compliance, data loss prevention and networking monitoring systems are not designed to track social network communication. These solutions can only monitor the corporate network traffic and hence are ill equipped to track social network services which can be accessed by employees from any device or network. Social Sentry was created to solve these problems. Social Sentry provides granular, real-time tracking and can identify and monitor employee public communication happening from any location, within the corporate network or public Internet.

This software comes with several features that sound a little intrusive to me:

• Discovery: Leverages Teneros’ unique “Social Tracking” technology to provide automatic detection of employee social network presence even if employees are using personal aliases for communication.

• Monitoring: Provides automatic monitoring for historic and new employee social network activity and identifies potential risks related to inappropriate comments or content posted by employees.

• Data Loss Prevention: Provides the ability to detect sensitive corporate information exposed accidentally or maliciously by employees.

• Compliance: Enables tracking of employee interactions with customers, prospects and other external users on social networks; discovering risky employee customer communication through personal social network accounts as well as detecting customer data being exposed.

• Archiving: Provides the ability to record the monitored communication and content. Communications can be recorded for a select set of employees based on risk assessment or for legal and compliance issues.

• Reporting: Provides business intelligence by analyzing the employee social network content. It will provide usage reporting on a per employee basis or for a group of employees to identify worker productivity concerns. Content analysis will enable data mining on the key topics of discussion among employees as well as the ability to identify viral threats.

I suppose that if you work for a company, you should not be bad-mouthing them online, or revealing trade secrets, or even talking about them at all if it is not your responsibility to do so. I get why companies don’t want that to happen. But monitoring all of an employee’s social media activity, and archiving it and tracking it even when the employees are off their network and their clock, just to guard against a negative comment…I don’t know…it’s a tricky issue.

Thoughts?