By Jonathan Hyman

From businessmanagementdaily.com

 

According to a recent survey, 22% of employees say they use some form of social networking five or more times per week, and 15% admit they access social media while at work for personal reasons. Yet, only 22% of companies have a formal policy that guides employees in how they can use social networking at work. Here are seven key questions to ask when drafting a social networking policy for your workplace.

Cave drawings were the earliest form of social networking. Today people tweet their thoughts for the world to see. In between, we’ve had instant messaging, MySpace, Facebook and blogs. Online social networking is here to stay—the only change will be in what form it takes.

According to a recent survey conducted by Deloitte, 22% of employees say they use some form of social networking five or more times per week, and 15% admit they access social networking while at work for personal reasons.

Yet, only 22% of companies have a formal policy that guides employees in how they can use social networking at work.

Before we can figure out what to do about these exploding media at work, we need to know exactly what we are dealing with. So, for the uninitiated, here is a short lesson on the various types of social networking likely being accessed from your workplace right now.

• Blogs: Blog is short for weblog. Blogs either provide commentary on news or a particular subject or serve as an online diary. There are hundreds of millions of blogs on the Internet, many updated every day.

• Facebook: Facebook started as an online tool for college and university students to connect with each other. It has since expanded to allow anyone over the age of 13 with a valid e-mail address to open a free account. It is loosely organized into a variety of networks based on schools, location, employers, charities and other causes. Connections are known as “friends.” People update with short written blurbs about what they’re doing as well as pictures, video and the like. Facebook has over 200 million registered users. Even my mom has a Facebook page.

• LinkedIn: LinkedIn is an online network for professionals. It allows people to search and connect via alma mater, location, employer or various user-created groups. It has over 41 million members.

• Twitter: Twitter is the latest big thing in social networking. It is known as “micro-blogging.” “Tweets” are text-based posts of up to 140 characters, displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to followers—other users who have subscribed.

I could draft a perfect social-networking policy to cover these new media using only a few words: “Be mature, be ethical and think before you type.”

Ultimately, you may decide that such brevity is what you want for your business.

For the sake of completeness, though, review the section below to consider the seven most important questions when drafting a social-networking policy.

1. How far do you want to reach? Social networking presents two concerns for employers—how employees are spending their time at work, and how employees are portraying your company online when they are not at work. Any social-networking policy must address both types of online use.

2. Do you want to permit social networking at work at all? It is not realistic to ban all social networking at work. For one thing, you will lose the benefit of business-related networking. Further, a blanket ban is also hard to monitor and enforce.

3. If you prohibit social networking, how will you monitor it? Turning off Internet access, installing software to block certain sites, or monitoring employees’ use and disciplining offenders are all possibilities, depending on how aggressive you want to be and how much time you want to spend watching what your employees do online.

4. If you permit employees to social network at work, do you want to limit it to work-related conduct or permit limited personal use? How you answer this question depends on how you balance productivity versus marketing return.

5. Do you want employees to identify with your business when networking online? Employees should be made aware that if they post as an employee of your company, the company will hold them responsible for any negative portrayals.

Or, you could simply require that employees not affiliate with your business and lose the networking and marketing potential Web 2.0 offers.

6. How do you define “appropriate business behavior?” Employees need to understand that what they post online is public, and they have no privacy rights in what they put out for the world to see. Anything in cyberspace can be used as grounds to discipline an employee, whether the employee wrote it from work or outside of work.

7. How will social networking intersect with your broader harassment, technology and confidentiality policies?

Employment policies do not work in a vacuum. Employees’ online presence—depending on what they are posting—can violate any number of other corporate policies. Drafting a social networking policy is an excellent opportunity to revisit, update and fine-tune other policies.

Entire Aricle

 

Popularity: 98% [?]

By Brian Krebs and Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writers

The indiscriminate use of a popular online data-sharing technology has led to the disclosure of sensitive government and personal information — including FBI surveillance photos of a Mafia hit man, lists of people with HIV, and motorcade routes and safe-house locations for then-first lady Laura Bush, a congressional panel was told on Wednesday.

The information is often exposed inadvertently by people who download the technology to share music or other files, not realizing that the “peer-to-peer” software also makes the contents of their computers available to other users, experts said.

The issue is so pressing that the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.), said he would introduce a bill to ban such software from all government and contractor computers and networks.

“The administration should initiate a national campaign to educate consumers about the dangers involved with file-sharing software,” he said.

Robert Boback, chief executive of Tiversa, a company that scours music- and file-sharing networks on the Internet for sensitive data, said the use of such software is being exploited by foreign governments for espionage and other purposes. “Other countries know how to access this information and they are accessing this information,” he said.

Boback told the committee that Tiversa found FBI surveillance photos of an alleged hit man on the Internet while he was still on trial. The company also found the government’s confidential witness list for that trial, which included the names of some people in the government’s witness protection program. He said the company found the documents while scouring the networks for other data for a client.

Boback, who was asked by the committee not to publicly identify the hit man, said the defendant was recently convicted and sent to prison for life.

“This is not information you want to have out there,” he said.

A spokesman for the FBI said late Wednesday that he did not have enough information to comment on the surveillance photos. The Secret Service said that the motorcade routes and safe-house locations are not classified or top secret. Such data is “not of any value” after an event, said Secret Service spokesman Malcolm Wiley. “And if something like that were to emerge before an event, keep in mind, we’ve got other security countermeasures in place.”

In addition to the list of people with HIV, which included Social Security numbers, Tiversa discovered records with full psychological assessments of patients with conditions such as bipolar disorder.

Alan Paller, director of research at SANS Institute, a computer-security training group, said that health data are a new target of organized-crime groups. Experts say a copy of a medical record can fetch money on the Internet black market.

“This is unbelievably sensitive medical data,” said Deborah Peel, founder of Patient Privacy Rights, a health-privacy advocacy group. “It has people’s names on it from mental-health treatment programs, drug studies. All of these medical files have everything needed for identity theft, the most prominent and frightening consumer issue with electronic systems.”

Towns said he would ask the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether inadequate safeguards on file-sharing software constitute an unfair trade practice.

Mark Gorton, chairman of the Lime Group, which makes LimeWire, one of the most popular peer-to-peer, or P2P, programs, told the committee that the latest version of his company’s software makes it extremely difficult to accidentally share sensitive documents.

He said that any effort to regulate the industry would be difficult, as LimeWire is one of hundreds of such software providers. “Most creators of P2P applications are not based in the United States, and may not even be corporations,” Gorton said.

The Department of Homeland Security warns that file-sharing technology exposes users’ computers to infection, attack or exposure of personal information. It recommends avoiding the software.

Entire Article

Popularity: 52% [?]