According to a new survey by Forrester Research, 41% of large companies (those having at least 20,000 employees) either read or analyze the contents of outbound e-mail.  They’re either paying other employees to read them or presumably using any number of commercially available software programs to analyze them. 

44% of the companies surveyed investigated a confidential data breach involving e-mail in the past year, while 26% said they fired an employee for violating the company’s e-mail policy.  Companies also expressed concern over employees leaking information on message boards, blogs, and other electronic media.

Quite frankly, I’m surprised only 41% of large companies are doing this (although it depends on the industry).  I would have expected it to have been much higher given the daily parade of data and privacy breaches in the news.  After all, it’s large companies that have the financial and human resources to implement widescale e-mail monitoring systems.  Smaller companies may be in a much different situation.

Of course, many employers find it distasteful to engage in this type of monitoring.  It can, if not handled properly, be destructive to employee morale and have lasting effects.  Nevertheless—for better or worse—many employees are slowly coming to grips with their employers’ monitoring efforts.  It’s just becoming a fact of life. 

But the truth is, I’ve had clients whose employees have e-mailed confidential and sensitive company data.  Some workers do it without thinking about it, while others are far more malevolent in their intentions.  This is especially the case when employees leave their companies on bad or poor terms.  So it’s a very real problem for employers that has very real consequences.  Thus, like it or not, monitoring will only continue to increase. 

Bottom Line:  Be careful.  You don’t have any right to privacy when you’re at work.  So don’t think that anything you send—whether to a spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend, doctor, stockbroker, or anyone else—is private.  Even if you have to send it and it can’t wait until you get home, an employer is within its rights to read your e-mail, no matter how private the subject matter.  Of course, what it does with that information is another matter.