Study: Third of firms read workers' e-mail

From Reuters via the Houston Chronicle:

Big Brother is not only watching but he is also reading your e-mail.

According to a new study, about a third of big companies in the United States and Britain hire employees to read and analyze outbound e-mail as they seek to guard against legal, financial or regulatory risk.

More than a third of U.S. companies surveyed also said their business was hurt by the exposure of sensitive or embarrassing information in the past 12 months, according to the annual study from a company specializing in protecting corporate e-mail at large businesses.

Click here for the rest.

You know, I'm a big civil liberties guy from way back. My extreme stance on freedom actually began back when I was fairly conservative--I figure that I embraced free speech first because I always hated being told to shut up as a kid, and embracing everything else was a natural next step, you know, once I figured out that we have lots of cool rights and all. I was even a card-carrying member of the ACLU for a few years until I figured out their shoddy positions on gun control and campaign finance, but that's another story. Anyway, no matter how I look at this issue, I can't find a civil liberties angle. Sure, it would be nice if employee emails are protected by the right to privacy, but I just don't see why they should be. They're written on company computers, on company time, sent through company servers, ostensibly for company business: it strikes me as completely reasonable that a company would want to know what's going on with its email traffic. Not just reasonable, companies would be stupid if they didn't check this stuff out. I mean, really, these emails belong to the company, whatever employee wrote them. My take has always been to simply assume that my email communications are being monitored when I'm at work; my personal emails are on a personal account, which I access at home. No big deal.

Why are so many workers morons on this?

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