What to do about Facebook in the workplace? That’s the question facing every enterprise IT administrator and CIO charged with walking that fine line between improving productivity and safeguarding critical, proprietary data.
As eSecurity Planet reports, making the right choice is often not a black-and-white decision. In fact, according to Internet security firm OpenDNS, Facebook has the odd distinction of being both the most-blacklisted website and, ironically, the second-most whitelisted site.
“Overall, 2010 was all about social, and this trend is reflected in the data we’re seeing at OpenDNS. Facebook is both one of the most blocked and the most allowed websites, reflecting the push/pull of allowing social sites in schools and the workplace,” OpenDNS CEO David Ulevitch said in the report.
The report, which was derived from data culled from more than 30 billion DNS queries a day, found that 14.2 of enterprise and school networks actively blacklisted Facebook last year. MySpace checked in second at 9.9 percent followed by YouTube and DoubleClick.net at 8.1 percent and 6.4 percent respectively.
Not surprisingly, websites defined as “pornographic” (85 percent) were the most-filtered URLs in 2010. Proxy/anonymizer sites, which contains sites users will use to try and circumvent Web content filtering settings, were the next most-blocked sites at 76.2 percent, followed by adware (69 percent), nudity (67 percent), gambling (58 percent) and drugs (57 percent).
Among whitelisted websites, which administrators will often single out from a particular category of websites that might otherwise be blocked, YouTube was given a green light on 12.7 percent of networks, just ahead of Facebook at 12.6 percent.