Want A Job Reading Email?

from the what-a-job dept

A new study has found that companies are so worried about what’s going out over email that 44% now employ people whose job it is to read outgoing email to make sure company secrets aren’t getting out. Now, it may depend on the company (and secrets) in question, but doesn’t it seem likely that paying someone to read through outgoing email may be a bit expensive than the likelihood of real risk from an outgoing email?


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Comments on “Want A Job Reading Email?”

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9 Comments
msykes says:

Hmm

That seems to me like the ideal job to have in order to sell secrets to other companies. I mean unless they have a second layer of email readers reading the emails from the other email readers…

And do they have these guys on 24/7? Or when you try to send an email at night it just sits around waiting to be scanned.

Google should just offer a service for this…

msykes

HumbleOpinion (user link) says:

Re: Hmm; Reading Outgoing Mail

I imagine that these companies have filters on their outgoing mail that try to identify messages with confidential or obscene content. When the filter flags a suspect message, someone has to read it to confirm whether it is a false positive or not, and then notify the employee’s supervisor, etc.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Hmm; Reading Outgoing Mail

there is no way that you could flag confidential content.
Well, sure, occaisionally you’d get a positive, but to be anywhere near reliable, you’d have to have a parser that completely understood english. I’m pretty sure that doesn’t exist yet.
The confidentiallity breach won’t necessarily say “these are the plans to project 56G” (easy to spot).
More likely it would be more like “we decreased detention time by 2 minutes and increased the particle size by .1 nanometers.” The parser would have to know everything about the company to spot that. Catching it would net a *lot* of false positives.

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