According to TNW Facebook wants to come to work. They’re working on something called “Facebook at Work“. Thinking about this from the perspective of a large company this seems a bad idea for all sorts of reasons; here are five.
- Privacy; Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg famously said “Privacy is dead”. That doesn’t inspire me to put company sensitive information on their network.
- Privacy; EU legislation is tougher in relation to privacy than the US. For example I cannot require anyone in my team to give me their twitter handle. I cannot use personnel data to search through social media to find more about our employees. Facebook claims this will be separate, but I can see employees creating a work specific account, defeating facebook’s goal of connecting everyone.
- Privacy; I strongly suspect that using personal accounts to login to a work system won’t fly with the Works councils in many EU countries. They are very protective of the work-life balance of the employees.
- Privacy; doing this means facebook acquires a whole lot of data on where people work that has not been shared.
- Privacy; this set up means facebook acquires data on what your company is working on. Even if they can’t see inside the documents the activity levels give information. During the financial crisis reporters watched the windows of banks late at night to see if the press teams were active. This is the virtual equivalent.
Would you use a “facebook at work” in your company?
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