Ask Slashdot: Should Employers Ban Smartphones?

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."

Comments

No persuasion required

[Anonymous Coward]

You have asked an audience that knows just how ingrained smartphones are to our everyday lives. The last half of your question is a "given."

The burden of proof is on the employer to show that no other mitigating measure can address the risks. Summarily banning child protecting, emergency-aleviating technology, not to mention the tools with which we coordinate the rest of our lives, is truly bad form and will bite the employer more often than they know.

If you are working with sensitive documents, these people will remove the camera from your iPhone for $20:
http://www.iresq.com/iphone-camera-removal.html
Want to do the whole office? A 79 cent roll of electrical tape will do the trick.

The problems are solvable and worth solving. That management favors solutions that are simply a matter of writing policy, is in their nature, so don't sit in the dark and bitch, fix the bulb.

Re:No persuasion required

[Anonymous Coward]

The burden of proof is on the employer to show that no other mitigating measure can address the risks.

My current employer has banned all personal cellphones and personal laptops for some time. It is really not that hard to get around, and the burden is not on them to prove anything. You are paid to work and presumably want your job. If not having your pacifier with you at all times makes you that uncomfortable, find a different job. Or you can give out your work number for emergencies or set your cell phone to automatically forward calls during business hours to your desk phone. If you need to make a personal call that you do not want to/cant make from your desk line, go out to your car during lunch and make it.

That management favors solutions that are simply a matter of writing policy, is in their nature, so don't sit in the dark and bitch, fix the bulb.

So if a concern is the microphone on the phone you have no problem filling that with epoxy?

Re:No persuasion required

[Minwee]

What do you recommend for people who use public transit instead of driving to work?

Death

I see that you work for the Muni.

Re:No persuasion required

[PmanAce]

Summarily banning child protecting, emergency-aleviating technology

What happened to giving them your work place number like you know, your parents did? Children were just as safe before smart phones...

not to mention the tools with which we coordinate the rest of our lives

I don't agree with this at all. 10+ years ago we didn't use smart phones and we coordinated the rest of our lives just fine.

The problems are solvable and worth solving. That management favors solutions that are simply a matter of writing policy, is in their nature, so don't sit in the dark and bitch, fix the bulb.

I think management just wants you to do your job and not have you sit there browsing facebook on your phone, texting your friends or calling for appointments while you are getting paid.

Re:No persuasion required

[h4rr4r]

That is the tradeoff from expecting people to take care of business during personal time.

It cuts both ways. You want me on call 24x7 for a week and available if you really need me other times, then I will be making personal calls on the clock.

Ban of outside laptops

[tepples]

Would you ban laptops at work for the same reason?

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

Re:Ban of outside laptops

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Suck it up.

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as my job pays me for every minute they intrude into my personal life or past the 8 hours a day I owe them, sounds fine with me.

Back a few decades ago ....

[PPH]

... when I worked for Boeing, this was their company policy. No cameras, radios, or recording devices were allowed on company property. Although this was necessary in areas where classified DoD work was being done, they just applied this policy to all facilities. As cell phones and PDAs with cameras andd recording capabilities became commonplace, they pretty much gave up on enforcing the 'no devices allowed' rule (probably still in force in actual secure areas).

I would consider them (Boeing) and others in their line of business to have about the most conservative position on such technology. Seeing as how they have pretty much given up on such rules, I don't see how any other employers expect to get away with them.

Also, if employees are going to steal proprietary data (for which I'm sure there is a company policy prohibiting said activity), sneaking a camera, USB drive or whatever onto the property in violation of rules is not going to be a deterrent.

Not just malware that is an issue

[oobayly]

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.

Re:Suck it up.

[MightyYar]

Am I too old or something? We always ran our personal lives from work, but it used to be a lot more invasive. You couldn't take care of many things online, so you had to leave work during working hours to take care of it. Any time you needed customer service, you had to use the telephone at work. You'd have errands to run, so you would either come in late, take an extended lunch, or leave early. Expecting a call? You had to hover near your desk so that you wouldn't miss it.

I won't defend tweeting, updating Facebook, and the like - but I think that most employers recognize that letting people take care of some personal stuff while at work ultimately improves productivity.