The study, conducted by Proofpoint, shows 41 percent of large U.S. companies — those with 20,000 or more employees — admit to having staff members in charge of monitoring or analyzing outgoing emails. About 30 percent of all companies, small or large, have such staff. And get this: Half of them say their virtual hall monitors have no other duties outside of watching you.

More than a quarter of employers say they’ve fired someone based on what they’ve found in the last year. The most common concerns? “Adult, obscene, or potentially offensive content.”

Of course, it’s not just messages they’re monitoring. Eleven percent of U.S. companies say they’ve punished employees for what they’re doing on blogs or message boards during company time. Thirteen percent have disciplined workers for their social network time.

In other news, I don’t know if you got the memo, but we’re using the new cover sheets on all our TPS reports now. So if you could go ahead and try to remember to do that from now on, that’d be great.

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