Enterprise TV is different - it watches you......

It never ceases to amaze me how little people know about how much their privacy is being abused in closed worlds online - today CNet notes that many US companies spy on their own employees communication.

A new survey finds that 41 percent of large companies (those with 20,000 or more employees) are paying staffers to read or otherwise analyze the contents of employees' outbound e-mail.

In the study, which was commissioned by e-mail security provider Proofpoint and conducted by Forrester Research, 44 percent of the companies surveyed said they investigated an e-mail leak of confidential data in the past year and 26 percent said they fired an employee for violating e-mail policies, according to security portal Help Net Security.

Its an open story in the industry fer crying out loud - there are social network analysis companies making a living selling packages to analyse emails, draw up social graphs, define behaviours etc. What makes people think for a second that its only Facebook up to these stunts? And this just joins the ranks of surveillance tools like CCTV etc.

In Europe, because of our data protection laws it is (theoretically) illegal to analyse our emails etc, but if I were employed by a US outfit I'd make sure they are aware, just in case.