You knew it was only a matter of time. Techrigy Inc., a Rochester, New York startup, has launched a new “social media compliance product” called SM2 that scans through a company’s intranet servers to find social media, likes blogs, running internally, as well as the internet externally to find employees talking about the company from their blogs or wikis from home. You heard right, it tracks what you say from your computer in your house.

As a service, Techrigy ties into search engines like Technorati, to look for potentially sensitive information published by a company’s employees. It then catalogues policy violations and provides notifications to the company’s enforcers in real time and indexes all the detected social media into a central repository for record retention purposes. (Read, if we get sued or you say something nasty about the company or your boss, your ass is grass.)

What makes this service different from standard e-mail monitoring tools that are widely used in business organizations already is that SM2 also keeps track of what you’re doing away from the workplace. Understandably, this makes people who still care about free speech and civil liberties (and I’m one of them) very unhappy.

Techrigy president Aaron Newman’s rationalization is that many companies are so paranoid that employee bloggers will create legal problems or reveal insider information that the alternative to SM2 is to ban social media altogether. He points to a white paper that reads, in part:

We strongly believe in the freedom of expression and any company that would try to restrict that freedom would likely not retain talented employees very long. However, the freedom of expression does not apply to revealing trade secrets, sharing proprietary company intellectual property, sexual harassment, or breaking other company or organizational policies.

Organizations should not leave it to employees to decide if and how blogging is acceptable. Without a set of guidelines to clearly tell when someone steps too far over the line, the result is the Wild Wild West. The vast majority of employees will use common sense when blogging. However, best practices require an organization to not only “trust” but also “verify.”

As much as I would like to think otherwise, I suspect Techrigy is going to be a bit hit–as long as they promise to keep their customer list a secret. This is the kind of thing that could easily boomerang into a public relations nightmare. What company wants the world to know it doesn’t trust its employees?