72.8 Percent Of All Statistics Are Made Up -- Or Maybe Twice That When It Comes To Facebook Blocking

from the this-again? dept

Another "web security firm" (I'm not going to give them undeserved publicity by naming them but you can click the link if you care) is getting some easy publicity by announcing the results of a survey finding that half of their customers block MySpace or Facebook surfing at work. That's not too surprising, since this was a survey of the customers of a company that sells blocking software. We covered a similar publicity stunt back in August (and indeed we've been debunking these stories for years). That study found that 43 percent of workers are blocked from accessing Facebook at work. But the latest study finds that only 25.6 percent of the firm's customers block Facebook. There are a couple of ways we might interpret this data. One is that Facebook blocking is actually falling, and that we can extrapolate no Facebook blocking at all sometime next May! The more likely explanation, though, is that these numbers are totally meaningless and self-serving. Of course, these stories inevitably go on to quote a company executive about how personal surfing at work is a "growing concern." In the latest story, the company predicts that two-thirds of companies would be filtering by next year. I'm sure it's just a coincidence that the company is selling the software companies would need to do that filtering.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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