I have read an interesting article in our partner's website recently about an employer who read the employee's messages to make sure she is not doing anything else rather than her regular job at the office.
In the article you will find detailed information about the legal aspects of such incident, so today I decided to give you some points why your employer has a strict reason to read all your messages including personal ones.
Employees should not be allowed to do any personal work at workplace, and I am sure that many employers will agree with me on this.
It may be so important for your employer so that you do not waste your time for which you are being paid. But allowing employees to do personal activities at work may cause some security problems you may not know.
SEE ALSO: The Employee Password Habits That Could Hurt Enterprises
You are a part of an organization, therefore, your every conscious or unconscious mistake can be decisive in the future of the company. That is the reason employer takes control over your work activities.
In other words, from an Information Security perspective, you are a risk inside an organization. And the Head of a company must protect it from internal (insider) and external threads.
So, why does your employer read your messages?
Information leakage
Information leakage is the most popular and risky problem in the Information Security field.
That is why you are asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement in many organizations which includes a clause restricting employees' use and dissemination of company-owned confidential information.
Wrong work habits
While the employees are trusted to move or handle data as a part of their regular job, more than half of them email business documents to their personal accounts for work at home or travel, but never delete those documents.
As Symantec reports, 37% of employees share company information through services such as "google docs" or "dropbox" without the company permission. 50% of employees when moving to a new company bring sensitive documents from previous vendor planning to use that information at their new jobs.
Conspiracy
Fortunately there are many IT security solutions that help identify privacy risks to employers.
Security is a people — not technology — problem.
— Jackson William, Government Computer News.
These solutions can take control of employee messages and any potentially dangerous sources within the organization that can cause data breach.
Summary
If you are an employer, as a specialist I would suggest you to protect digital data in an organization by deploying strict security policies and periodically reviewing them.
To increase the awareness within your organization about how critical security is by informing and periodically training company users: employees, contractors and other authorized users of their obligatory requirements for protecting the technology and information assets of the company.
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