By the year 2015, 60% of employers will monitor social media pages of their employees, a new report by data analysts Gartner has claimed.
The ‘Big Brother’ monitoring will be driven by security worries about employees leaking information or talking negatively about their workplace.
By the year 2015, 60% of employers will monitor social media pages of their employees, a new report by data analysts Gartner has claimed
‘The growth in monitoring employee behavior in digital environments is increasingly enabled by new technology and services,’ said Andrew Walls, research vice president of Gartner.
‘Surveillance of individuals, however, can both mitigate and create risk, which must be managed carefully to comply with ethical and legal standards.’
Most employers will use their monitoring to prevent security breaches – but simply having the technology at their disposal will be a huge temptation to managers who want to know more about their staff.
‘The development of effective security intelligence and control depends on the ability to capture and analyse user actions that take place inside and outside the enterprise IT environment,’ says Walls.
Walls predicts that the practice – increasingly common in America – of asking for Facebook passwords as part of job interviews, will fade out of fashion.
Earlier this year, Facebook said it has ‘seen a distressing increase in reports of employers or others seeking to gain inappropriate access to people’s Facebook profiles or private information.’
