If I'm holding an egg and I tell you it's a snowball, is it still an egg?

Recently, The Xobni Team, left a comment on my blog entry The Latest E-mail Spying Software - Just in Time for the Holidays that was an effort to correct what they feel was a misrepresentation of their software in a Boston Globe Article.

In their response, they write:

Xobni Analytics is not about spying on employees. It’s about improving the business process. Which emails waste the most time? What customer is the engineering team most actively emailing, and what is being discussed? How quickly do we respond to emails from customers? How much time do people spend reading and writing email, and about what topics?

Ohhhhhh okay! I get it now. You're only scanning the CONTENTS and RECIPIENTS of my e-mail to monitor my productivity and efficiency. And we all should believe that monitoring the contents of my e-mail in the name of "improving the business process" is perfectly okay. Stupid me.

Guys, I know you're a couple of developers just trying to make a buck for yourselves. I get it. But come on! Consider what you're enabling companies to do. One of the JobSchmobbers, Dharmadee, said it best when she commented: "...allow me to point out that Albert Einstein was a pacifist, and it certainly was not his intention to contribute to the development of the atomic bomb. Sadly-the intentions of the developers of a technology usually do not have a say in how that technology is used or misused in the secondary market.".

This is not to say that there aren't monitoring packages out there for companies who want to spy on their employees. But yours is unique in that it allows companies to cloak themselves under your convenient attitude, which I understand to be, "We're not spying on you, we're just trying to improve the business process. If a side effect is knowing the contents of all your e-mails, then so be it."

Gentlemen, I'm a software developer myself and understand the high of creating something from nothing and selling it. But I think that it's extremely unfortunate that developers sell out to The Man in this way. At some point, you had to have thought or realized that your software allows companies to read the contents of an e-mail and exploit them for purposes other than what you intended. Perhaps you justified it to yourselves with the old "if a person isn't doing anything wrong, then he has nothing to hide" attitude. And if you truly never thought about the privacy implications, well then we're all thinking it for you now and hoping you do the right thing.

I realize that both of you Xobni founders are in your twenties and you have much to learn and many mistakes to make. But let's not let this be one of them. If you act now, you may have time to get your soul back.

As an aside, we're not alone in feeling this way.

Jobschmobbers, feel free to chime in.