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In Finland, Nokia May Get Its Own Snooping Law
notany writes "Nokia may be too big a company for Finland (a country of 5 million people). It seems that Nokia's lobbyists can push an unconstitutional law through the legislature at will. After Nokia was caught red-handed, twice, snooping on its employees (first 2000-2001, second 2005), the company started a relentless lobbying and pressure campaign against politicians to push what the press has been calling 'Lex Nokia' or the 'snooping law.' This proposed law would allow employers to investigate the log data of employees' e-mails, legalizing the kind of snooping that Nokia had engaged in. Parliament's Constitutional Law Committee asked the opinions of eight legal experts, and all opined that the proposed law is unconstitutional. The committee ignored all the advice and declared the proposal constitutional." An anonymous reader adds a link to an AFP story reporting that Nokia has threatened to pull out of Finland unless the law passes.
The country code for Finland used to be SF, standing for Suomi-Finland, as Suomi is how we Finns call Finland. The ongoing joke was that SF really stood for Soviet Finland due to our somewhat submissive relationship with the USSR.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
While the right for employee to monitor your net usage while you are using employer's systems is up for debate, this bill is much worse.
The bill doesn't mention e-mail, or workplace.
It only contains words of "community subscriber" and "identifying information, but not content".
So, universities and schools can monitor what students do on the Internet. Over any protocol, not just e-mail. Who do they call on VoIP. What websites they visit. Same applies for libraries. Or even community housing.
Currently, in Finland, it is illegal to monitor emails of employees who are using company equipment and the company network. This is, of course, completely absurd.
All Nokia wants is the ability to see the the following information: Sender, Receiver, Size and Type of Attachments, and Date/Time. They don't even want to read the contents.
They have a reason to believe that an employee used their own email system to sell their IP.
Does anyone here really think you could run a large company without being able to monitor emails sent by company representatives, using company resources? Does this really seem right to you?
They're associated with Sony, who also own Sony BMG, part of the RIAA, and installed rootkits on lots of unaware users' computers. That's all I can remember I'm sure they've done other things too.
The Unicode standard is over 20 years old. Why does Slashdot not support it?
The problem with work mail is that we are quite heavy unionized here in Finland (even in IT sector which - I've heard - isn't as unionized on the other side of the Ocean). The union's representatives have full right and reason to use their work address to communicate with other employees regarding business with the union.
Employers should really not be allowed to snoop on this. Same goes for other info that you are allowed to use your work mail to but the employer shouldn't be allowed to read. For example, I (like a lot of Finns. We have decent universal healthcare but many employers make deals with private firms too) have healhcare paid by work. I don't think that still means I am not allowed to have confidentiality with my problem. And if I'm not, that should have been in the contract originally.
My mobile phone is due for an upgrade. It looks like Nokia join Sony-Ericcson on the blacklist; they can all get fucked.
You are not a frequent reader? In the last few weeks, Nokia put Qt out under LGPL. The good karma earned through that action alone should be enough for us to ignore strongarm political tactics (and small PR disasters) for a while.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Well, the Finland has nowadays one of most stricts privacy laws. What Nokia wants to do, is the thing US companies do routinely every day claiming that they has to do it to protect shareholder value.
The law at present proposed form is nowhere close to laws (if one exist) in many "civilized" countries, not to talk about totalitarian countries. Like one not-so-democratic east of Finland, and one we-listen-your-communication west of Finland.
It is actually quite funny, that the existing law is known as "Lex Sonera" (Sonera was a former state-own telco now part of TeliaSonera). The former CEO of Sonera wanted to find out which employees leaked information to press by getting call records of many people (board members, other employees and journalists). This obviously backfired and we got one of most strict implementations of EU privacy laws.
Now Nokia with other companies wants to get some of those rights back (earlier the law was unclear for computer communications, but the right of privacy existed there) they unofficially had before that. Of course, we as citizens and employees do not want to give that away. Even if I need to do extra tricks when I do my work to keep user data private.
I personally like very much that Finnish law tries to protect employees: often the situation in working life is quite uneven and the employer has upper hand in many cases. Laws put some limits on that, even if cannot protect in all cases.
Um, why is that? Here in the US, unions generally cannot use employer resources to conduct union business. That makes sense, and obviates the privacy concerns anyone might have. Is it really that hard to register a Gmail account?
It's pretty ludicrous that in Finland you can just take confidential company information and use your work email to send it to a competitor. Not only is your company not allowed to look at the content of the emails you send, but they cannot even investigate WHO IT WAS SENT TO. This makes sense how?
Besides your astonishing lack of perspective, putting Qt under the LGPL was not a contribution to the free software community at all, hence not a consideration. It was already free software.
They just want proprietary companies to develop for their toolkit, presumably in great part because of their plans to leverage it on the Symbian platform as well.
Don't get me wrong, the LGPLing is all fine and okay, it's just not very consequential as far as liberty goes, and that is the axis which we're talking about with this law.
You conveniently left out the fact that a number of law professors were asked for their expert opinion, and they unanimously said that the bill was unconstitutional. This expert opinion was then ignored by the politicians preparing the law.
This is not entirely unlike what happened with the copyright law (the so-called Lex Karpela) a few years back.
More than the leftist government bureaucrats, I'm worried about the right-wing politicians that are doing whatever their big-business masters want with total disregard to both public and expert opinion, the constitution and the principles of a democratic state.
-A Finnish AC