The Gartner technology research firm broke some conversational ice earlier this week when, at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando, analysts told attendees that their corporations should stop with the heavy-handed restrictions on social networks in the workplace. "Banning access to social media from the corporate network is futile. The world we live in is digitally enabled and socially connected," CNET News quotes Gartner vice president Carol Rozwell as saying.

IT departments have had perfectly good reasons for the lockdowns, of course. Social networking from company machines can be both a security issue and a devourer of time. But, according to Gartner senior VP Peter Sondergaard, the autonomy of employees is key, and educating employees about being responsible while networking should replace attempts to keep them from networks altogether.

Along similar lines, a survey released this week by security consulting firm Unisys reveals that 64 percent of Americans don't trust cloud storage for confidential data. It's easy to believe, when just recently a bug seemingly wiped out Sidekick users' personal data. A week later (after many users had gone through many of the grieving stages and begun recreating their contact lists from scratch), Microsoft and T-Mobile announced that the data was, in fact, retrievable. As noted by David Coursey in his PC World blog, the Sidekick users' time is not retrievable.

Also, Google announced that it would henceforth prevent Google robots from crawling and archiving the content of Google Voice voicemails. Isn't that nice? The good news (for Google, at least) is that they made the change before the issue got out of hand. The bad news, of course, is that the public archiving of voicemail content had been implemented in the first place. Seems like that would've come up in a meeting at some point as being a Really Bad Idea.

What is your experience with social networking, cloud storage, and security, both in the workplace and at home? And, what do you think of Gartner's suggestion that companies loosen up?