Most of these measures have to do with the amount of risk that a company is
willing to put up with.  Having worked for pharmaceutical companies and
defense contractors, I can attest to the fact that they have a certain
degree of justifiable paranoia when it comes to security.

Most of these types of companies have their own IM services (like Microsoft
Communicator) and have them configured not to keep logs of conversations.
The main reason for this is that (like email) IM conversations can be used
in court cases (as Microsoft has seen).
Similarly, companies will sometimes block investor sites, and rumor sites to
prevent proprietary information from leaking out.  The standard procedure is
that if someone asks you for information about the company, or provides
misinformation about the company, it's not your job to correct that
information, or supply information about the company.  The public relations
person is usually responsible for dealing with the public.  The usual policy
is that you don't discuss business outside of company offices, or on
non-company hardware.

As far as banning cell phones, most companies will ban these for two
reasons: you can take pictures with them, and if they have an SD card in
them, you could walk out the door with proprietary information in the SD
card.  Many companies will also block USB ports, SD card readers, and CD
writers on computers for similar reasons.  Some companies will allow cell
phones as long as they do not have cameras, but there are also companies
that have "secure areas" where you place your phone on a shelf before
entering the room.

ITunes is often banned because you can easily fill up a hard drive with your
tunes/podcasts, and it eats up bandwidth when your downloading songs and
podcasts, or sharing your tunes with your co-workers.

Encrypted harddrives are used because some types of databases use Social
Security numbers as identifiers for patients, or employees.  There have been
numerous cases where this type of personal identifier information was on an
unencrypted hard drive on a laptop that was stolen while going through
airport security, or waiting in a hotel lobby for a client.

Hope this helps explain a few things.

Mark

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