Are you friends with your boss or company seniors on Facebook? If so, it appears that they might be snooping around your social media accounts to find out whether or not you have been spilling brand-related secrets or breaching security regulations.

According to Gartner, 60 per cent of firms were planning to cook up some official regulations which will ensure that social media monitoring becomes an additional clause in formal employment agreements.

The researcher suggested that the stronger social media surveillance rule among those 60 per cent will come into power by the end of 2015.

At the moment, one in ten companies admitted that it monitored social media activity for not only brand-related activity but also for security purposes.

Andrew Walls, Research Vice President at Gartner, was quoted as saying:

"Given that employees with legitimate access to enterprise information assets are involved in most security violations, security monitoring must focus on employee actions and behaviour wherever the employees pursue business-related interactions on digital systems."

However, this emerging trend raised quite a few concerns, including privacy issues, with staff not feeling comfortable about their personal data being seen (and possibly unintentionally leaked) by third parties.

Mr Walls continued:

"The problem lies in the ability of surveillance tools and methods to produce large volumes of irrelevant information. This personal information can be exposed accidentally or become the target of voyeuristic behaviour by security staff."

SimplifyDigital predicts that while the approach makes sense - the brand should know if an employee is posting confidential information maliciously - but if social media monitoring gets abused, there is likely to be a fresh line up of civil court cases...