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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.
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!
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"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").
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.
You cannot sign away your rights in Finland. There are strict rules about what an employment contract (or any other contract for that matter) can legally include.
The ongoing joke was that SF really stood for Soviet Finland due to our somewhat submissive relationship with the USSR.
Anyone calling the Finns "submissive" towards the USSR has never bothered to read a history book. If the Finns were submissive, Finland wouldn't even exist as a country today. The Finns stood up to Stalin and resisted his aggressive designs -- they managed to stalemate the Soviets for more than three months even though they were outnumbered 4 to 1 (in men, the disparity in tanks/aircraft/artillery was even worse) and kept their sovereignty.
Here's a tidbit for anyone that tells you the Finns were submissive: Of the European nations involved in WW2 only three managed to survive the war without having their capital occupied by the enemy: the UK, the Soviet Union and Finland.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.