July 23, 2004 Bulletin

Companies step up e-mail surveillance

By Jo Best
Special to ZDNet
July 20, 2004, 8:25 AM PT

Large companies are now so concerned about the contents of the electronic communications leaving their offices that they're employing staff to read employees' outgoing e-mails.

According to research from Forrester Consulting, 44 per cent of large corporations in the United States now pay someone to monitor and snoop on what's in the company's outgoing mail, with 48 per cent actually regularly auditing e-mail content.

The Proofpoint-sponsored study found the motivation for the mail paranoia was mostly due to fears that employees were leaking confidential memos and other sensitive information, such as intellectual property or trade secrets, with 76 per cent of IT decision makers concerned about the former and 71 per cent concerned about the latter.

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