P&G blocks employee access to Pandora, Netflix
This week, Procter & Gamble announced it was blocking employee access to the movie and music streaming sites because of bandwidth use. Is it the first step on a slippery slope?
Procter & Gamble isn’t one of those companies, but this week, the household goods giant barred its 129,000 or so employees from accessing video-streaming site Netflix and music site Pandora.
Why? Employees were watching so many movies and listening to so many songs that it was “hobbling the company’s digital backbone” to the point of slowing down Internet service,” according to the Cincinnati Enquirer. The newspaper reports more than 50,000 YouTube videos were downloaded daily and employees listened to 4,000 hours of music a day on Pandora.
Paul Fox, director of corporate communications for the company, told Ragan.com, “We want to be the most digitally enabled business in the world, we want to be always ‘on’ and we need to ensure our network resources and capacity stay ahead of our business demand.”
Fox says P&G is more lenient than other employers, in that it doesn’t block Facebook, Twitter or YouTube.
Netflix and Pandora aren’t strictly social websites, though they do have some social features such as ratings and profiles. But one has to ask, is this a first step toward banning other sites?
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