50% of employees are being block from accessing Facebook at work, according to a new survey by Sophos, a world leader in IT security and control...
Keep in mind, Sophos has a vested interest in the results as "[their] WS1000 appliance defends firms against web threats, and allows IT departments to block access to unapproved sites. and has a vested interest in blocking sites. " Nonetheless, these are very interesting results that I would tend to agree based on some recent experiences. A few weeks ago, I tried to log onto Facebook from a Fortune 100 clients site with no success â€" it was blocked.
It is a testament to the advances in management thinking over the last 20+ years that we still seem to be driven by the knee jerk reaction of attempting to kill something new. IT is a master of this and every time I hear such stories, I wonder what kind of infrastructure is IT running that they are afraid something like Facebook will break their existing systems.
If you want to get data out of Facebook then you need an application capable of doing that. That requires you register with Facebook. The company has recently responded to criticisms about it letting developers create spamming applications. Ergo, the chances of someone compromising corporate data are at worst slim and at best remote. Of course there will always be some enterprising hacker who will find an entry point but honestly - how hard are you going to work to get maybe a handful of names? And yes, there have been the odd occasion when Facebook security has been breached. As always, these incidents are blown way out of proportion.
Take this for what it is - scaremongering horse crap of the first order.
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