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Ask Slashdot: Should Employers Ban Smartphones?

Posted by samzenpus on from the no-phone-for-you dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Due to a concern that smartphones (and other electronic devices) could be infected with malware and used to spy on sensitive information, my employer has recently banned all personal electronic devices from their spaces. The concern comes from articles like this one. My question to slashdot readers: How reasonable is this concern? How can this sort of malware be prevented from showing up on our devices? Is there a way to educate employees about preventing this sort of thing rather than banning the devices altogether? This current reality is that people have started to rely on having their smartphones with them at all times for things such as receiving emergency calls from day cares and schools, making personal calls during normal working hours (i.e. to make doctor's appointments), accessing password managers, and scheduling calendar events."

3 of 510 comments (clear)

  1. Ban of outside laptops by tepples · · Score: 5, Informative

    Would you ban laptops at work for the same reason?

    A lot of businesses do in fact ban laptops that aren't company-owned.

    1. Re:Ban of outside laptops by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      All the other reasons listed are ones of convienence, not necessity.

      Almost certainly. That said, all employees expect a certain amount of convenience, which varies greatly by situation.

      I'm an IT guy. If a company I worked for started with the, "no smartphones at work" thing just because they wanted to make sure they were getting every last second of productivity out of you, whilst working you overtime for no additional pay (as this rule will almost certainly be, every time), I'd add it to a list of reasons to go elsewhere.

      As with most things, it's not necessarily one thing that makes you leave... it's a lot of things adding to employee dissatisfaction.

  2. Not just malware that is an issue by oobayly · · Score: 5, Informative

    We were have some pretty bizarre network problems in our office one day - some machines were able to connect to our db server whilst some couldn't, and other could intermittently. Long story short*, somebody's smartphone (Android in this case) was responding to ARP requests (requesting the MAC of the server) even though it was showing its IP address as being assigned by DHCP. I reckon its previous IP on the user's home network was the same as our server, and for some reason kept answering to them.

    *Once I realised that packets didn't seem to be making it to the server (pings were intermittent), it dawned upon me to check the ARP tables on the clients. Looking up the manufacturer of the MAC address didn't immediately help as I didn't recognise the name, though I assumed it was a phone. At that stage I wasted time looking through all the phones looking for an IP address conflict (bad assumption). Finally looked up the DHCP leases for the offending MAC, found it's current IP (no hostname was provided by the client), found the offending phone, and very nearly shoved it the arse of the owner.