“Banning Facebook could backfire” says Ontario privacy commissioner
Ontario’s privacy commissioner Ann Cavoukian says that banning employees from visiting social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter at work isn’t a good idea.
“I think it’s a mistake,”Cavoukian said. She completely understands why in today’s environment some businesses may favour an outright ban, but says such prohibitions are almost always counterproductive.
What the commissioner has neglected to mention, is the fact that although a ‘blanket ban’ is not the solution, neither is unsecured open policy.
To leverage the advantages that twitter, facebook and other social networking/user generated content sites bring to your business, you have to allow access and mitigate the security risks associated with them.
I am a whole hearted advocate of saying ’yes’ to these Web 2.0 sites - as long as you have both a usage policy to educate your ‘users’ AND a security solution in place that can categorize pages on these sites in real time - thus giving you the ability to maximize the advantages, without compromising your security posture.
Read the story as reported on itbusiness.ca
