If you’re savvy enough to know about The Digital Breakfast, chances are you’re savvy enough to be aware that you’re not the only one who has access to knowing where you go and what you do on the web, which includes your employer being able to discover the contents of your company emails. And while employers are just as able to manually monitor their employees’ communications on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, they probably haven’t seen the value in it, considering the time it would take if they have any substantial amount of employees and a life outside the four walls of their office.

But a new product called SocialSentry could change that…

For a social media junkie (at least an employed one, anyway), SocialSentry could sound somewhat ominous. Not only can SocialSentry help an employer find any of its employees’ public Facebook or Twitter accounts, but it can also allow them to monitor those employees communications via those Facebook and Twitter accounts, for a nominal fee of $2-$8 a month per employee.

It’s billed as a preemptive measure to detect situations like an employee leaking confidential company information through Facebook or Twitter (it will soon be able to monitor LinkedIn, Myspace and others as well) or an employee’s gripe like the one contained in this post’s title image, but really, the tool can be used to monitor any communication through Facebook or Twitter and as Teneros’s (the company that developed the product) Chief Executive told the Times, “[Teneros] only provides the application and software, it is the companies that decide what to do with it.”

Of course, as that little gem of a screen shot illustrates, it’s not like employers couldn’t look up your Facebook account and see what you’ve posted without a tool like SocialSentry. And frankly, if you were worried about this type of thing, the smart move would have been to either not friend your boss on Facebook, or at least only give him or her limited profile access if you do. But not everyone thinks like that, and indeed, especially with younger employees, sharing way too much on Facebook and Twitter has kind of become commonplace. Plus, even if you did so, it seems SocialSentry could break through that limited profile wall and see the things you have shared so long as your actual Facebook account itself is public.

Twitter is somewhat of a different animal, since you can indeed make your profile private and SocialSentry can’t penetrate that privacy wall. But while it can’t bust through the walls that protect a private account, how many people really have private accounts? Out of the 300 some individual accounts I follow on Twitter, I’d say maybe 10% of them are private, and I think that’s being generous.

What really strikes me about SocialSentry, though, is that Teneros doesn’t really even try and frame its product description diplomatically. While it does only bullet out product uses that implicate sensitive company interests, it’s really just saying hey, you can now spy on your employees easily. Perhaps this is just a taste of what’s to come for those of us in the work force, but honestly, I think this is a little intrusive. Personally, my Facebook account is basically un-discoverable, and my Twitter account is private. But just knowing that companies may be trying to monitor my personal communications (after all, we’re not talking about company email – provided by the company and expected to be used for company-specific communication) on the two biggest social networks is enough to make me cringe. Certainly they have a right to know if their employees are leaking confidential information, but when it comes to other types of communications, where do we draw the line between work-relevant and work-irrelevant?

So I guess the message is – if you weren’t already, be that much more careful about what you say and do on Facebook and Twitter. You may think there’s no way your boss will see it, but as I think this post demonstrates, you may be wrong.