Employee-Owned Devices Muddy Data Privacy Rights

snydeq writes "As companies increasingly enable employees to bring their own devices into business environments, significant legal questions remain regarding the data consumed and created on these employee-owned technologies. 'Strictly speaking, employees have no privacy rights for what's transmitted on company equipment, but employers don't necessarily have access rights to what's transmitted on employees' own devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and home PCs. Also unclear are the rights for information that moves between personal and corporate devices, such as between one employee who uses her own Android and an employee who uses the corporate-issued iPhone. ... This confusion extends to trade secrets and other confidential data, as well as to e-discovery. When employees store company data on their personal devices, that could invalidate the trade secrets, as they've left the employer's control. Given that email clients such as Outlook and Apple Mail store local copies (again, on smartphones, tablets, and home PCs) of server-based email, theoretically many companies' trade secrets are no longer secret.'"

Comments

Re:Who profits by muddied waters?

[vlm]

Back then you couldn't just connect a phone to another device and retrieve and make public everything that was transmitted on it.

Sure you could. Darn near 30 years ago my father had a terminal at home hooked up to a printer. And 40 years ago my grandfather had a reel to reel tape recorder hooked up to the phone (business purposes, something about dictation services and the then new concept of documenting conference calls with engineering consultants). This is old old old old case law. So I ask again, who profits by dredging this up and muddying the waters with a fake sheen of newness?

See the thing about IT/CS, is there's never really anything new, its just all recycled over and over, everything, and the noobs always think they as the youth of American are the ones who invented it. There is some old saying about every generation of teenagers think they're the first generation to invent 1) rebellion and 2) music and 3) sex and everyone old enough to see the pattern just laughs.