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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?
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.
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