Olson’s Observations

VentureBeat ran a post today on a new service from a company called Techrigy which could cause the amount of people getting fired for writing blogs to increase dramatically.

Techrigy’s new service is called Social Media Monitoring (or SM2) and it is designed to help companies track their employees blogs and wikis. The service essentially works like a custom search product. The company first creates a list of employees, competitors and organizations that they want to monitor and the system pulls back a list of blogs and wikis based on the list. The company can then refine that initial list down to the exact blogs and wikis they want to keep an eye on. After the list is refined SM2 will capture every new post and save it (you can also search the archives as well) at which point the company can run “policy checks” on the content.

Policy checks look at all of the content collected by the SM2 crawler and decide if there are any company policy violations in the content. Companies can search for pretty much anything including, but not limited to, statements that could mean an employee is discontent, political and religious sentiments and comments on company management. As VentureBeat points out SM2 sounds a lot like Big Brother.

There are already a lot of e-mail monitoring solutions out there for employers (see the VenutreBeat article for a nice short wrap-up of them) but this is the first corporate social media monitoring solution I have seen.

Unfortunately this line is one which we should not cross casually but we will probably leap over it without much thought. Why you ask? Well, the answer is pretty simple.

Companies want more control and Techrigy’s SM2 technology will give them that control. In that sense Techrigy looks to be a very promising investment to whatever VC or group of VCs that decide to put up the $2 - $5mm Techrigy is shopping for right now. Techrigy will most likely get funding and then companies, looking mainly at the short term, will probably adopt the technology.

Bottom line: there seems to be money to be made with SM2 so someone will try to make it whether it is right or wrong. In this case it is a very grey area and although it feels ethically wrong to me it may not to others.

This technology seems to be delving much too far into the personal lives of employees. The small fraction of a percent of employees that are looking to harm their employer can probably be found without such invasive actions. As one VentureBeat commenter puts it:

So what this does, at the end of the day, [is] let corporations scan for every stupid photo of you dancing, singing on an online karaoke competition, [and] collect all that info, just in case…. sounds like a military state to me.

SM2 could easily be compared with the Patriot Act in the sense that both give up far too much privacy for law abiding citizens in order to catch the handful of bad eggs. In fact, a Ben Franklin quote comes to mind that sums things up nicely:

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Employers should look to hire good employees that they can trust to make good decisions outside of work. Of course no one has a 100% good hire rate but companies should be able to find the folks that aren’t doing well by the company without forcing everyone in the company to sit under a microscope.