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December 28, 2007
Mobile Privacy: Nobody Has Any, Nobody Cares
Interesting overview from internetnews about location-based mobile service and how the courts balance it against individual privacy:
"Last month, the Washington Post reported that law enforcement officials routinely get court orders requiring mobile network operators to help track suspects. They used to do this by regularly pinging suspects' cell phones; the job has been made even easier with the arrival of GPS in phones.
"While this practice could save a life -- for example, helping to locate a kidnapping victim -- some judges don't require law enforcement to show probable cause that a crime is being committed.
"According to the Post, one judge reasoned that since a suspect was voluntarily carrying a tracking device, no warrant was necessary.
"In August, a New York City employee was fired from his job after the GPS on his city-provided phone showed that he'd been at home before his shift ended on 83 occasions, according to the New York Post.
"The judge in that case, according to the report, said an employer 'is not expected to notify its employees of all the methods it may possibly use to uncover their misconduct.'"
To judge from those two cases, the mood in the courts is dismissive of any notion that our social behavior and expectations haven't had a reasonable amount of time to catch up to the technology we're all using.
In a former job I was told to turn on monitoring software for users and turn off anything that would indicate to them that they were being monitored. I didn't tell the users, but a lot of them noticed my pointed interest in hypothetical employer surveillance scenarios while we were hanging around at the watercooler.
My reasoning at the time for being less than discrete about the quiet introduction of workplace surveillance was that there was no formal code of conduct for the management at that job when it came to using surveillance, and I had reason to believe the monitoring would be used for petty snooping instead of legitimate management concerns. The request to turn on the surveillance software came as the result of no particular concern, and was made because I was stupid enough to mention the capability in passing.
As one of the few hired nerds working in that building, I was pretty inured to the idea that my boss could probably get a pretty good sense of all the activity on my computer; so that incident reminded me that most people don't have that expectation. A lot of people don't understand the technology, they don't understand the capabilities their employers have, and they don't, accordingly, modulate their behavior to reflect how likely it is they're being spied on.
So if you're introducing boss-approved spyware into the environment and disciplining employees for their behavior without giving them a chance to respond to your spying, you're essentially pursuing a moralistic policy, catching "bad" people for the sake of punishment instead of offering maybe bad (but probably just indiscrete or ignorant) people a chance to clean up their act. Considering how reactionary and poorly written a lot of AUPs are, that seems like a bad basis to work from.
Posted by mhall at 1:28 PM | Add Comment
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