Wired: Some Companies Banning Blogs

Posted on October 25, 2005

Wired reports that some companies are starting to ban blogs using security filters or censoring software. The article begins with an employee from a financial company that says blogs are blocked where he works.

Robert Mason (not his real name) would love to spend a few minutes during lunch catching up on blog posts from around the web, but his company doesn't allow it. The financial institution where Mason works as a vice president has security filters set up to block access to -- among other things -- any website that contains the phrase "blog" in the URL.

What's more, says Mason, such practices are becoming prevalent in corporate America, particularly in financial services. Mason sits on a roundtable privacy group of 20 of the country's largest banks. "My best understanding is that my company's anti-blog stance is the industry norm," he says.

One of the messages that a few organizations are trying to spread is that reading blogs equals wasted hours at work. Unfortunately, there is a lot of blog negativity around that corporations could use to make a decision that employees can no longer read blogs. The Wired article also said that some blogs are filtered out by security software.

Keith Crosley, director of corporate communications at censorware company Proofpoint, says there's no anti-blog conspiracy at work, but that some companies have higher security, privacy and regulatory needs that require greater diligence over what companies can and cannot do. In particular, companies worry that employees might leak sensitive material -- perhaps inadvertently -- while posting comments to blog message boards. In a survey of over 300 large businesses conducted in conjunction with Forrester, Proofpoint found 57.2 percent of respondents were concerned with employees exposing sensitive material in blogs. That's higher than the portion concerned with the risks of P2P networks.

The article says that some larger blogs like Fark.com have already seen their sites blocked by censoring software.

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