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Social Sentry Lets Employers Track Their Workers Across the Internet
« on: 2010-03-24 19:35:19 » |
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March 24, 2010
Social Sentry Lets Employers Track Their Workers Across the Internet
By FREDERIC LARDINOIS of ReadWriteWeb
How would you feel if your employer constantly tracked your activity on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter in real time? If it's up to Teneros, your employer will soon use the company's new Social Sentry service to follow your every move on social media sites in real time. As Teneros points out, more than 70% of white collar workers have Facebook accounts - which they regularly access during work hours - and a number of corporations like Domino's Pizza and British Airways have recently suffered major damage to their carefully constructed brand images because of their employees' actions on social networks.
Advantages of Using Social Sentry According to Teneros:
* Social Discovery - Discover employee social network presence across Twitter, Facebook and other social networks
* Anywhere Monitoring - Monitor employee social network activity occurring from any device
* Automated Rules Engine - Create advanced content monitoring rules with automatic notifications and alerts
* Reporting & Analytics - Create reports and analyze social network usage by employees across time, source and network
Track Your Employees Across the Web
Social Sentry gives employers the ability to track their employees' online activity, provides granular real-time tracking and allows employers to "monitor employee public communication happening from any location, within the corporate network or public Internet." The services gives employers the ability to monitor select users or the entire employee base.
The idea behind this, of course, is to make sure that employees don't leak sensitive information on social networks or engage in any behavior that could damage a company's reputation. From a corporation's point of view, this makes complete sense. After all, these companies have to ensure that their secrets are protected, compliance regulations are followed and risky behavior by their employees is exposed quickly. On the other hand, most employees would probably have strong feelings about a system that constantly tracks their every move on the Internet (even if they use an alias, by the way).
If The Data is Already Public, Is Aggregating it an Invasion of Privacy?
Of course, Social Sentry only tracks information that is already public, but as Danah Boyd noted in her SXSW keynote earlier this month, even the aggregation of seemingly public data can quickly feel like an invasion of privacy. Until now, tracking data from all your employees would have been an arduous and costly task, but with a program like Social Sentry, it's automated, easy and relatively cheap.
How Would You Feel if Your Employer Used Social Sentry?
How would you feel if your employer started using Social Sentry and kept track of all of your comments on Twitter and YouTube? Would you be okay with that? Is it just the same as a drug test and a background check, or would you quit your job if your employer started using this tool?
Copyright 2010 ReadWriteWeb. All Rights Reserved.
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