BYOD threatens your privacy?
Members of staff who plan to use their tablets or Smartphones at work should be read to sign on what can be referred to as IT dotted line, which basically means giving away their private rights. The situation is that, a number of employees sometimes may think of downloading confidential information from company computers to thumb drives weeks or days before they resign and go to competitors with the information.
However, it is not easy to get away with such. Most managers are usually equipped with the USB port registry, a type of forensic computer analysis, to deal with these employees before they exit. Notably, mangers have the rights to take legal action because of the protective policies of the company, for example, the authorized use of computers, the ethics policies, conflict of interest policy, and confidentiality non-disclosure policies among many others.
According to Brent Cossrow, a partner at Fisher and Philips, the BYOD information pattern is not different; companies can write certain policies to offer such protection for the employer. Cossrow’s firm specializes in employment and labor law. He says that business interest face a lot of risk these days hence employers would want to check if their computers have been used in a certain time. A BYOD policy, if written in a specific way, could offer the necessary support.
Cossrow helps many companies to go through the complex legal matters involved with BYOD. A BYOD tablet or Smartphone owned by an employee distorts the line that exists between work and personal use. It is easy to store information on a BYOD than a thumb drive through cloud service or on the device itself.
Smart companies need to come up with a customized BYOD policy that will be in harmony with protection policies that are already in place. Some restrictive companies require the employee to do away with any privacy expectation when using a BYOD tablet or Smartphone together with corporate computers.
Employees should not expect any privacy on the BYODs they personally own if there is no expectation of privacy in the company. This case might even get worse; companies might be planning to be more ambitious in search of personal data on the personally owned devices.
However, employees using BYODS have one legal precedent dealing with privacy issues at the workplace. One case is the Stengart vs. Loving Care Agency. Some time back, Marina Stengart ceased working with Loving Care Agency and thereafter sued the company for gender discrimination. However, before she did this, Stengart communicated with her attorney using an email account of the corporate computers.
About the Author: This post is written by John Lewis and he works at PriceCollate as a writer. You can visit pricecollate to find and compare various type of shoes at great prices.
