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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.
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
- 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.
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
What did SE do?
Perhaps, in Finland, one cannot sign away this particular right.
After all, many employment contracts in the US specify that one's job is "at-will" and one can be fired at any time for any reason (mine does). However, signing such a contract still leaves you with rights that the government considers as inviolate, such as the right not to be fired due to your race. No amount of signing, even if the contract specifically states "You sign away this specific right" can take some enumerated rights from you.
Perhaps in Finland, the right not to be spied upon by one's employer is such a right. I don't know that, but if Nokia has multiple times been chastised for doing this, one might assume that could be the case.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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