Social Networking Risks
This essay appeared as the first half of a point-counterpoint with Marcus Ranum.
Are employees blogging corporate secrets? It’s not an unreasonable fear, actually. People have always talked about work to their friends. It’s human nature for people to talk about what’s going on in their lives, and work is a lot of most people’s lives. Historically, organizations generally didn’t care very much. The conversations were intimate and ephemeral, so the risk was small. Unless you worked for the military with actual national secrets, no one worried about it very much.
What has changed is the nature of how we interact with our friends. We talk about our lives on our blogs, on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and on message boards pertaining to the work we’re doing. What was once intimate and ephemeral is now available to the whole world, indexed by Google, and archived for posterity. A good open-source intelligence gatherer can learn a lot about what a company is doing by monitoring its employees’ online activities. It’s no wonder some organizations are nervous.
So yes, organizations should be concerned about employees leaking corporate secrets on social networking sites. And, as much as I hate to admit it, disciplinary action against employees who reveal too much in public is probably in order. But actually policing employees is almost certainly more expensive and more trouble than it’s worth. And when an organization catches an employee being a bit too chatty about work details, it should be as forgiving as possible.
That’s because this sort of openness is the future of work, and the organizations that get used to it or—even better—embrace it, are going to do better in the long run than organizations that futilely try to fight it.
The Internet is the greatest generation gap since rock and roll, and what we’re seeing here is one particular skirmish across that gap. The younger generation, used to spending a lot of its life in public, clashes with an older generation in charge of a corporate culture that presumes a greater degree of discretion and greater level of control.
There are two things that are always true about generation gaps. The first is that the elder generation is always right about the problems that will result from whatever new/different/bad thing the younger generation is doing. And the second is that the younger generation is always right that whatever they’re doing will become the new normal. These things have to be true; the older generation understands the problems better, but they’re the ones who fade away and die.
Living an increasingly public life on social networking sites is the new normal. More corporate—and government—transparency is becoming the new normal. CEOs who blog aren’t yet the new normal, but will be eventually. And then what will corporate secrecy look like? Organizations will still have secrets, of course, but they will be more public and more open about what they’re doing and what they’re thinking of doing. It’ll be different than it is now, but it most likely won’t be any worse.
Today isn’t that day yet, which is why it’s still proper for organizations to worry about loose fingers uploading corporate secrets. But the sooner an organization can adapt to this new normal and figure out how to be successful within it, the better it will survive these transitions. In the near term, it will be more likely to attract the next-generation talent it needs to figure out how to thrive. In the long term…well, we don’t know what it will mean yet.
Same with blocking those sites; yes, they’re enormous time-wasters. But if an organization has a problem with employee productivity, they’re not going to solve it by censoring Internet access. Focus on the actual problem, and don’t waste time on the particulars of how the problem manifests itself.
Categories: Internet and Society