Managing Employee Communications

At the end of an article titled "Managing employee communications" by Mathew D. Sarrel in the March 15 issue of eWeek, we read:

"Employee communications can be stored and analyzed forever. On the bright side, this isn't just for information security. Understanding how employees interact with each other—and with customers—over social networks can provide valuable insight to marketing teams."

I find this morally repulsive as it facilitates the destruction of social trust and consequently, human liberty. The wide deployment of such devices injects fear in all levels of society. In the United States, where much of social, commercial, and governmental transactions are trust-based, these devices will have a corrosive effect.

I think it was in "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" that Milan Kundera related how the Communist Government of Czechoslovakia, used eavesdropping on the private conversations of dissidents to discredit them by broadcasting those recorded conversation on the state radio.

Free (of retaliation or consequence) exchanges of ideas and opinions, as well as subjects of more personal nature, will consequently be severely harmed by the users of social computing systems (IM, eMail, etc.) due to the injection of the fear of exposure, intimidation, or blackmail. In more oppressive states, these types of devices will serve to enhance the power and the reach of repressive state organs.

These devices, being promoted and sold under the guise of enhancing security, are a threat to human Freedom & Liberty. Their security model is that of a Police State and not that of free individuals engaged in free and unencumbered exchanges with one another.