Slashdot Mirror
Conspiring Against Your Employer? Watch What You Email
Eric Giguere writes "In a story that has Bay Street (the Canadian equivalent of Wall Street) in a kerfuffle, the Globe and Mail writes that bank employees defecting to set up a rival investment firm didn't realize that their employer could easily track the emails and messages they sent and received, even when they're sent via a nominally-secure system like RIM's BlackBerry. In particular, the employees were assuming that the messages they sent via direct PIN-to-PIN communication (a PIN uniquely identifies a BlackBerry device) weren't trackable. But if they're on the device, they're available to the employer to see. The employees may also have thought that PIN-to-PIN messages are encrypted, though RIM has always said that they're not -- it's only the connection to the corporate email server that is secure. A lot of damning information pulled from those emails and messages has made its way into a lawsuit."
"A lot of people on the Street are going to have a few sleepless nights, going through loads of e-mail to delete them when they hear about this case"
Although an employer sometimes can go through the emails on your harddrive, I think what the people in this article don't realize is that it sounds like emails are being intercepted at the server level. Who is stupid enough to use company email to conspire against the company? Setup a freakin gmail account and talk about it at home!
I'm sorry, but I feel no pity for people being caught this way. Its very clear when you start working somewhere that the computers you use are the property of the employer, and you should expect no privacy from these machines. They used company owned BlackBerries because they thought it would be secret (implying that they knew other company computers were not). If you use something company owned because you think it is secure, while other company propery is not secure, it just shows you dumb enough to be caught. If they were so concerned about their privacy, they should not have used any company property.
These people are in charge of your money, folks.
They are idiots for two reasons.
First, because they clearly acted unethically, which is the really big idiocy. I run my own company and rule number one is due diligence. I am not going to screw myself by doing something that could bite me in the ass further down the line.
It's astonishing how many investment guys simply don't get this. I have literally had my own investment guy sit there and tell me that a particular investment 'cannot lose', in the presence of his lawyer -- who looked very uncomfortable and was forced to intervene by saying "Look, you cannot say that".
Second, anyone who uses unencrypted email on a server they do no control, ESPECIALLY if it belongs to someone they are screwing, deserves to spend the rest of their productive years flipping burgers, or possibly stamping licence plates.
I'm not wrong. You haven't thought about it hard enough.
Investment firms must catologue all emails for compliance and SEC inspection, in fact they must be kept for years. All transmitions including company issued handheld devices are monitored by this automated system at most firms. So if their canadian counterparts have to do similar things this is to be expected and they have a record of all of your emails for years probably.
Comment removed based on user account deletion