Social media regulation in office: is this legal to keep SM banned?

Development of SM-services and tools gives a user a unique chance to receive and spread information without any limits for his /her own responsibility. But most of the companies, state departments or organizations - especially in CIS countries - have some sort of regulation for the content and services which are allowed for the office use. Is this a violation of rights or a necessary tool of protection for keeping business data safe?

If your favorite social networks is banned at your working place this maybe the reason to say 2 things: a) your chief don't trust the working staff; b) you live in China, in Russia, Belarus or Ukraine. If you have restriction for achieving Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube or other world-wide SM-services and sites like these ones, you have restriction for opened public information, and this is automatically a kind of violation of your human rights and right for information guaranteed by most of the countries in the world. Does this mean your top-management violates Constitution? The answer is "yes" and the answer is "no". Why? Let's look closer at the whole topic of social media regulation.

If you deal with information which can be marked as "secret", "confidential", "only for internal use", "only for business needs" there is always a risk that this information can be stolen, hacked or spread via social media networks, sites or SM services. In this case the restriction for SM use is legal and obligatory one. But if your chief thinks it's the best way to make you and your colleagues work - it's stupid. There are dozen ways to violate or ignore work without any SM-addiction, only ex-USSR-companies top-managers still believe that the best way to rise productivity is to block social networking sites, restrict YouTube and cut off ICQ or Skype usage. This is the case of violation. Ukrainian laws do not cover this case widely, and this is the main reason why still thousands of offices and companies have restricted access to the social media and SM services (meanwhile, in this companies neither smoking nor private mobile phones are banned, and they are the second most effective way to pretend "being busy", more effective than Facebook usage or watching photos via Flickr). The other reason for access-limitation was to decrease the level of web-traffic for the company, but in the country like Ukraine where unlimited ADSL now starts from 60 UAH per month for private user and from 120 UAH per month for corporate clients (it's less than 6-12 EUR per month), this "reason" for keeping social media banned has no sense at all. That's why your chief has a right to cut off your usage of social media only in the case when you do not work at all or if you are a secret agent or a bank's manager; in all other cases this is a simple violation of Constitution, remember this.