38 percent of Big Companies Employ Personnel to Read Employee Email

June 7, 2006 — Leave a comment

Big Brother is watching you, at least if you are in the US. In Australia, the Privacy Act would technically prohibit this sort of activity to some extent. You’d think though that companies could make better use of their resources though (from WYTV)

In its annual study of outbound email and content security issues, messaging security company Proofpoint, Inc. found that email and other outbound messaging streams (including webmail and blog postings) continue to grow as a source of risk for companies.

The study found that 38 percent of companies with 1,000 or more employees hire staff to read or analyze outbound email. 44 percent of companies with more than 20,000 workers employ staff for this purpose.

Companies appear to have good reason to worry — more than 1 in 3 investigated an email leak of confidential or proprietary information and 36.4 percent investigated a violation of privacy or data protection regulations in the past year.