I.T. Managers are becoming the Hall Monitors of adult life. In a recent study by FaceTime Communications, 60% of I.T. Managers report that employees are using Facebook and other social-network sites at work, and this has now been linked to security incidents; "Information [can leak] out through those channels they can't monitor."

Among the most surprising finds in the report, according to [Frank Cabri, vice president of marketing and product management at FaceTime Communications], was that one third of the employees surveyed said they had the right to run these applications on their desktop, even if it was a violation of IT policy. "If applications are attractive and they allow the benefits for work or both, people are willing to go against corporate IT policy," he says.

..."I would never advise a company to give access to each and every [Facebook app] to its users," [Cabri] says. "First, determine which Internet apps users are deploying and how they are using them, he says.

"The key is putting controls in place," Cabri says. You could allow Facebook, for instance, but only with business applications within the group and block chats, he says. "And you should be measuring and reporting on what they are doing" with it, he says.

And there's more bad news for the social lives of office drones: A company called TextGuard "quietly released a beta version of its eponymous application, which offers a method of blocking and monitoring text messages on Windows Mobile and Blackberry telephones."

Now get back to work!

via dark reading 1 and 2