Slashdot Mirror
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.
In soviet union....hey wait a minute!
Any corporation that is big enough and has enough money, can get the politicians they buy to do anything for them, regardless of the effects on the rest of us.
The average person is nothing but a 21st century serf and the corporations are the royalty.
The scenery and technology has changed since the 1700s, but not much else has.
"There are laws that enslave men, and laws that set them free. " - Sean Connery as King Arthur
My mobile phone is due for an upgrade. It looks like Nokia join Sony-Ericcson on the blacklist; they can all get fucked. I guess it's a Samsung this time. If only all the 13 year old girls sending a million texts a month and those jackasses constantly yakking into their mobiles actually cared about corporate ethics, then such a boycott may actually be meaningful.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
- Law to force phone manufacturers to make their keys on their phones large enough for an adult male to operate without using a thimble
- Law to make phones water resistant. Currently all Nokia phones have a minature water detector linked to a self destruct mechanism
- Law to ensure annoying bugs in firmware are dealt with in a timely manner. No, not by releasing an updated model that you have to buy at full price because you're still on contract with the buggy phone.
- Law to ensure that the loudspeaker function doesn't change (and in particular isn't replaced with a cancel call button) between making a call and the call being connected.
- Law to ensure the phone doesn't require speakerphone to be activated before a human being is able to actually hear what's said. Phones shouldn't be built for magical leprechauns that live inside them
- Law to ensure that the duration of a call is logged in the call log, not just for the last call.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
wait. I'm confused.
there is still a country on earth that has SOME kind of privacy laws that protect individuals from those in greater power (employers, government, etc)?
the heck with nokia leaving finland. I want to MOVE THERE!
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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.
an AFP story reporting that Nokia has threatened to pull out of Finland unless the law passes.
Let them go. Companies that hurt a country should not be tolerated. Only companies that are useful should be welcomed. A corrupt company leaving a country is not a "threat" ("a source of danger").
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?
Finland has a long track record for being regarded as the least corrupt country in the world, or definitely in the top three, depending on the three.
This story has been seen as provocative, given this lily white context, so it's actually quite interesting to see where this goes, especially as we're simultaneously observing the story unfold around the 2% vote fail issue.
I'm surprised that the employment contracts for those employees did not stipulate that all employee email passing through their systems was subject to search. Compared with the USA under King George and Prince Chaney, any country with "laws blocking companies from monitoring employee emails" sounds like a privacy paradise.
I know we're all for humanizing these collective fictions called corporations. Even going so far as to equate them to real people in law.
Now, let's be realistic: someone inside Nokia decided that they personally wanted this law. I guess it's nice to have none of the responsibility for your actions yet the power to have them executed. Some single manager held a meeting and told people to do this, even though it is the whole company that will be judged based on this.
While the employees are paid to be tools of the company, it is a single, living an breathing idiot somewhere inside Nokia that wants to play voyeur. Who? Unless it's a VP or CO level person, we may never know. All we know is that someone might be trying to stop the flow of confidential information out of the company.
"You cannot have a General Will unless you have shared experiences. You cannot be fair to people you don't know."
Wouldn't it be insanely careless to leak information by sending suspicious emails from your corporate account anyway?
Also, does anyone who cares about privacy in any degree use corporate email for anything personal? I think it's reasonable to expect that your nokia.com account should only be used for your official nokia business. Also, corporate emails are typically much less convenient than e.g. gmail anyway, and with limited quotas. Do you really want to use them when you don't have to?
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
If I contracted out a translator to retype a French document in English, and I gave them my laptop to do it on I'd damn sure want to make sure I know everything he does on it.
I'd want to do the decent thing by making sure he knows that anything he does with the machine will be logged.
I think this is pretty reasonable, and I see a large corporation doing this as the same ethical situation - what is the problem here?
Who knows? By the time you get there, they might have joined the rest of the world and no longer care about their citizen's privacy.
It's looking that way.
But who am I, as an American, still subject to George W. Bush and Alberto Gonzales' so-called Patriot Act with all the warrantless wiretaps, no notice search warrants, gag orders, etc, to criticize any other country in any way for not caring about citizen privacy?
Listen son, in the Real World people don't have a choice in whether they can work to feed themselves or not. Unfortunately work takes up a disproportionate amount of time in one's life (despite computers and robots which were supposed to eliminate the need to work). Companies need to start accommodating workers instead of spying on them, stressing them out, and treating them like shit. A company like Nokia that will go out of its way to break the law in order to harm its employees should be forced to nationalize its assets (or at least have a suitable and similar punishment), unfortunately the people who run companies tend to be hypocrites and untrustful. We need to start spying on the executives of large companies, and not the other way around.
Solution: Nokia is attempting to extort the gov't to draw a custom law for them.
So the gov't nationalizes Nokia as part of a law they would draw up instead that states that Corps attempting extort the gov't should be nationalized.
Sure it doesn't sound fair and is, itself, a scary precedent. But it's no scarier then letting Nokia run a privately owned country and would certainly teach the CEO a thing or two about fucking with the people who grew his company up.
Arrested for what? I'm not sure there is a law forbidding company representatives from saying their company will leave if the legislative environment of a country is not changed to their liking.
For years I've felt bad for, well for example Americans for corporations having way too much power over there. Now even at my very own home country, the employer of my many friends of mine pulls shit like this, it's unbelievable.
For what? To spy their employees? What the fuck?!
Does Nokia even have the slightest competitive edge on innovation at any frontier? No it does not. In the past few years they've only managed to start copying others.. So I guess they are afraid their employees sending emails telling everyone that they are now starting to copy Apple or RIM or whoever employs innovative people. That's like sending answers to simple math questions like 1+1=2.
The law itself, so called "Lex Nokia" is bad, it's really bad. Any organization can, after it's passed start surveillance on their employees after filing some stupid form. Police won't have any control over these operations. You aren't even required to fill the god damn form, you can do it later on and pay a small fine!
Can you spell out obscene in some other way? This is ridiculous. I do not want to live here anymore if Nokia gets it's way. To hell with them, Finland would be a much better place without them. Poor, maybe a bit shaken but it surely isn't worth of losing every last sense of law in this country.
Just if someone would make sure to collect them every cent of development grants they've received in the past years before they go.
Please ignore - posting to undo moderation mishap.
I never get used to these constant resurrections
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.
Lemma see now...
1) I pulled out all of my CISCO gear when I first started working at a local logistics supplier, that was chuck FULL of CISCO. When my boss asked me WHAT WAS I DOING? I simply said, "Well, we have all of these old computers and they can act as gateways, vpn routers, and VoIP servers for our desktops. Why upgrade to equipment we cannot reuse in the budget for other things, or easily fix just by loading BSD or Linux on it?"
But it was all a lie of course...OR
Was it?
I replaced all of the CISCO gear because CISCO, was providing the Chinese government the means to kill and torture anyone they do not like online.
I kept that part to myself as my Boss loves CISCO. He likes to keep his job more though, so he left me do it.
I still buy from Linksys because I need WRT54GL's, which I load with that awesome DD-WRT firmware.
If anyone can recommend a better device I can buy from a company that doesn't help foreign governments hunt down citizens on the internet, that would be great. WRT54GL though is a pretty nice piece of hardware.
CISCO, you suck.
2) Novell. Oh, well...what can I say? Back in the day when I was a Novell administrator, I thought Netware 5 was going to be better and provide a protected mode OS you can run apps on. Nope, I was betrayed. I thought Novell was going to get a nice protected memory architecture and they promised it would, so it would run better, with less ABENDS at 4AM in the morning. They never did deliver any of those promises. Sigh.
I get cranky thinking about the early morning trips into the office, sorry.
But the whole buying of SuSe, getting money above and below the table from a unknown source, eventually, to find out it was Microsoft was the straw that broke the GNU Oxen's back.
So, I ripped out all of my Novell servers, pulled out all of my SuSe servers, and well, my boss was a problem. He liked the SuSe desktop. A couple of days later his workstation wouldn't boot. (I wonder how that happened?)
So, installed Fedora, and he loved it. I said "You know, Fedora is much more stable. We should install Fedora on all of our desktops and servers where we can and get rid of SuSe so you do not crash again." :-)
Called SuSe to tell them, "Tell Bill I said Hi the next time you give him a in the back room. Oh, and one more thing, YAST SUCKS."
Then there is the whole Icaza thing...with the .Net crap SuSe loads on the boxes. .Net is crap in the Microsoft world, so NOW Miguel gets the brilliant idea to make CRAP PORTABLE, and open up a distro such as SuSe to patent litigation!
Yeah, Novell...
YOU SUCK...
IT.
3) Now...SIGH. Nokia. Is it not bad enough, we have politicians who are stupid and remove more and more of our rights on a daily basis? No, you say? You say you want to speed that process up and sovereign governments where you do business are annoying?
That is really too, bad, Nokia.
Tomorrow, it just so happens, I will be calling our cellular carrier and complaining about the reception of these Nokia phones we currently use. (Not really, they work fine. It just begins the process I need to get rid of them out of the organization at all 20 locations in Wisconsin.)
But, make no doubt, after I sabotage, and kill these phones, we will be buying different ones at the end of our contract this May.
Does it always have to end this way?
Nokia. You SUCK.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
mod parent up - most insightful thing all thread
Always back up, never back down. ---- Think you're cool 'cos your uid is prime? Take mine, modulo the one digit integers
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?
In the US, we especially don't like tax-payer funded IT gear being used for union/political use.
The employer paid for it, they should get to dictate its use. If Nokia says "use work computers at own risk, we can see whatever you do on them", that is their prerogative. How'd you like it if you owned a company and employees were using the company vehicle for personal use...and YOU got in trouble for trying to get information about it? Nokia should leave Finland. A company SHOULD leave any place it finds a hostile environment.
THL phish sticks
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.
If you want to sell confidential data to your company's competitor, it is very likely that you'll do it via your home internet account. Does it mean that Nokia should be able to read your private mail too?
It is some strange trend that companies become so paranoid. Treating employees like traitors will not help them in any way. Those who want to hurt the company will find the way to do it anyhow. For instance, good way to hurt your company is to ruin its public image by breaking laws and lobbying for ridiculous legislations.
No sig today.
Finland has unemployment benefits to counter that though.
I live in Finland and don't work for Nokia, and am very sensitive about my privacy.
And this is pure FUD. It's just a rumor, and everyone related says there's been no threats when questioned.
And to make it worse, the law's only really bad side-effect isn't even mentioned - that it allows EVERY community internet provider to snoop on communications.
Which could easily be fixed by forcing people to sign contracts explicitly acknowledging that it's happening.
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.
Of course, as in the US, $MultinationalCorp will get its way.
We're told that we should be lucky that we're even employed. We're told that we should just STFU and GBTW.
There is no real sense of loyalty to company or vice-versa anymore.
"If for any reason you're not satisfied with our service, I hate you."
Yeah, well, and that attitude has kept the US at the forefront of individual freedom and liberty... Like, oh, habeas corpus.. No wait, they did away with that.. OK, freedom from snooping on phone conversations... Oh, they did away with that too. Like the ability to watch a DVD on my computer, or share music with my friends. No, wait, can't do that either.
What were you saying about leaving a hostile environment?
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
"Nokia should leave Finland."
WHAT? You've got some strange ideas my friend. So how's that work exactly? Does the executive move overseas (boohoo)? The employees? How does a multinational company 'leave' a country? And what will they do with their employees who actually make the company anything more than just a VC Firm? Fire them? Then what? So they've got a nice Nokia Trademark and no one to do anything with it. Oh and watch their share price go to 0.
Think the world and shareholders will wait and forgive their debts while they start from fresh?
"A company SHOULD leave any place it finds a hostile environment."
What does that mean exactly? Nokia started in Finland, grew and thrived under the laws as they stand so I guess that it's not that 'hostile'. And of course it's just *that* easy for a multibillion dollar company to pick up and leave and start fresh in a foreign nation, which of course would have it's own set of laws and regulations to work under.
Or do you mean "A company SHOULD leave any place whose government wont do exactly as its told when it's told by the tiny group of people, many who are foreigners, that make up it's shareholders."? Because that's all that amounts too.
Companies are just tiny groups of citizens working together under various pieces of legislation. The construct of a company has no inherent 'rights' and most constitutions don't even mention them. So why do you, and people like you, keep trying to tell us that companies have some sort of power and place alongside (and usually elevated above) private citizens? Companies in each individual country have exactly the rights given to them by citizens of that country via their government, no more and no less.
Companies can't tap employee phones or open letters addressed to employees, so why would email be any different?