Protecting Against the Dangers of Blogging

Unfortunately, I could not post the article I am blogging about because it is password protected. Allow me to provide a brief synopsis. The article appeared in a recent issue of Ignites, which is a mutual fund industry newsletter. Asset management firms are clearly having a tough time right now due to market turmoil, and it's even more imperative for them to be able to adequately protect confidential or company-specific information. These firms have always valued protection of information, whether it be pending job cuts, internal memos, or customer data. The article describes the real difficulty the Internet presents to controlling this important information, and one particular tool is mentioned - blogging.

The article cites some pretty incredible statistics. According to Technorati, there are more than 133 million blogs on the Internet and about 900,000 new posts per day. Additionally, it estimated that 77% of Internet users scan blogs even if they don't write any themselves. This is rather illustrative of the tremendous ability the Internet provides for the control of information to be compromised. To hedge against the dangers of blogging, firms have written policies that specifically prohibit the mentioning of company-specific information on public forums, without prior consent from the company. However, the article cites interviews with labor attorneys who state that employees may be able to cite privacy rules if their firms attempt to discipline them for disseminating company information, especially on platforms outside of company control.

Just an another interesting example of old school issues meeting new school tools. Companies have always been concerned with information getting into the wrong hands, but they have never had to deal with an environment such as the present where the publishing of information was possible with such ease. I suspect their issues will only become more prevalent in the years to come as Web 2.0 tools evolve into Web 3.0 tools and it becomes even easier to disseminate information.