Coastal Council Silences Status Updates

- Tuesday, September 01, 2009Security

Portsmouth Council have this week moved to block all 4,500 staff from accessing Facebook

Portsmouth Council have this week moved to block all 4,500 staff from accessing Facebook. According to estimates, staff spent "on average" 400 hours per month on the popular social networking site. Quite how these figures were calculated remains unclear.

The council stressed it was unable to determine whether staff had been accessing Facebook in break times or before or after work, which had been allowed. This strikes folk here at Smoothwall as a technology failure - this sort of reporting should be childs' play, and indeed such restrictions could be enforced by all good filters (and some bad ones).

UK taxpayers should be pleased that councils are clearing up their act when it comes to employee time wasting, but it is a shame that a local newspaper had to rake up the figures from "freedom of information" requests.

Putting the brakes on Facebook is not, however, a magic bullet. This will penalise the majority of honest users who use the site mostly at break times, while serial timewasters feet-up Fred and long-lunch Lucy will just find other ways to satisfy their craving for procrastination. Many proxy sites will allow users illicit access to Facebook - these can be hard to block with all but the most up-to-date filter techniques - and many other sites besides Facebook cater admirably to the timewaster demographic.

Needless to say, intelligent filtering would have saved Portsmouth Council from the taxpayers wrath, helped them to single out the serial timewasters (and restrict their access accordingly) and block backdoor routes to Facebook and other banned content.

More information:

• BBC News
• ITPro