Today CNET published an article claiming that Facebook could cost employers as much as $4 billion (yes, thats BILLION) dollars per year.

Internet security company SurfControl looked at the phenomenon and found that Australian workers who keep a close watch on their Facebook profile page were cumulatively costing their employers up to 5 billion Australian dollars ($4 billion) a year.

Hmmm. SurfControl “looked at the phenomenon.” Ok, let’s see – who is SurfControl?

From their website:

SurfControl Web filtering solutions enable companies to cost-effectively monitor network use and abuse anywhere in the organization, no matter how or where users connect to the Internet, across the full spectrum of Web-based content: IM, P2P, streaming media, file downloads, and Web-based e-mail.

So, a company who sells products that allow employers to filter internet content, comes up with a report that companies are losing $4 billion a year to Facebook. Slight conflict of interest here eh?

I could only imagine the economic boom we’d see if people stopped surfing Facebook! Just imagine all of the new products, inventions, cures for disease, and subsequent world peace that would occur if this menace was stopped! I am going to go out and buy SurfControl right now to get ahead of this as fast as I can.

In reality, social networks, websites, distractions, are always part of what workers have to contend with – information workers and otherwise. If employers think that Facebook (or SurfControl) is going to reap them many man-hours of productivity gains, they are likely the same employers whose employees waste time by surfing the web all day instead of contributing to the bottom line.