Citadel of the Blogs The Inbox of the Internet (really)

Proofpoint, Inc. found that 32.1% of surveyed companies with 1,000 or more employees hire staff to read or analyze the contents of outbound email. 38.8% of larger companies surveyed (those with more than 20,000 employees) employ staff for this purpose. Additionally, 16.9% of companies surveyed employ staff whose primary or exclusive job responsibility is to read or otherwise analyze email content.

This is pretty staggering to my mind:

-More than one-quarter of surveyed companies (27.3%) have terminated an employee for violating email policies in the past 12 months. 45.5% have disciplined an employee for violating email policies in the past year.
-More than one-quarter (26.3%) of surveyed companies report their business was impacted by the exposure of sensitive or embarrassing information in the last year and 33.8% investigated a suspected email leak of confidential or proprietary information.
-29.1% of the largest enterprises (20,000 employees or more) reported that employee email was subpoenaed in the last 12 months.
-48.7% of respondents said they are “concerned” or “very concerned” about Web-based email (such as HotMail or GMail) as a potential conduit of confidential or proprietary information.

People sometimes suspect this is happening at the university where I work. But I don’t think so. It infringes on academic freedom too much, firstly, and Canada’s broader sense of privacy protection, secondly.

Last week I posted about Harper’s secret dealings on re-patriating spent uranium. An issue for Canada since we are the largest producers.

Now I find that the federal government revealed it had closed-door consultations on plans to force Internet service providers to turn customers’ personal information over to police without a court order.

That’s pretty shocking — a court order is a standard these days. I don’t see how we can expect to hold American companies up to this standard if we ourselves don’t abide by it.

Hello Canadian PATRIOT Act.

FOLLOW-UP Sept 17/07
It appears that this information was limited to the “envelope information” which I posted about before in relation to Google & Privacy. I state that it is okay with email but is fuzzier when applied to IP addresses and URLs.