Acceptable use policies meet the reality of demographics

I just read "Assessing Secure Web Gateways and Web Filtering Solutions" by the Burton Group. This report talks about filtering technologies, which isn't exactly new, but it did contain something that I hadn't seen before. In particular, the report says "An organization that blocks social networking sites may determine that there are business uses for those sites or that the organization's policy is hurting staff recruitment or retention."

That's the first time that I've seen someone say that you may have some very undesirable side-effects if you block employees from social networking sites. I'm not a big user of these myself, but I know lots of people who are and I can certainly understand that social networking sites are an important part of some people's lives, and that how they might be either reluctant or unwilling to work in a place where they can't use them.

There have been lots of discussion in the past few years about how the demographic trends, at least in the rich, industrialized countries, seem to indicate that the workforce will start shrinking in the not-too-distant future and that competition for skilled employees may heat up because of this. If this is the case, we may see employers more and more reluctant to do things like banning employees from using social networking sites. Maybe what the Burton Group is talking about now will become a much bigger issue in the future, and we'll find that corporate security policies will need to reflect the needs of the employees as well as the needs of the information security organization.