Recently, an interesting article in the Globe and Mail dealt with the issue of smartphone etiquette. Business professionals fidgeting with their BlackBerrys and iPhones in meetings, walking through airports with eyes glued to their small glowing screens and operating their devices in restrooms may seem unrealistic at first blush, but is it really? The reality is that smartphones have permeated the business world. They are everywhere, they are powerful and have the potential to be extremely damaging.
Breaches of confidential corporate data and personal information are nothing new to the business world, but smartphones have brought a new dimension to the problem. Smartphones are starting to make appearances in Canadian court cases in a supporting role, but it won’t be long before they are squarely in the spotlight. The latest iPhone model has up to 32GB of memory while BlackBerrys can store vast amounts of data on memory cards. The equivalent of entire filing cabinets can now be carried around conveniently in your shirt pocket. This reality has increased the risk for massive privacy breaches in the blink of an eye.
The big question is how involved should employers be in regulating and monitoring their employees use of smartphones? All encompassing monitoring of employee smartphone use is a touchy area, but the permeation of smartphones in today’s corporate world and the corresponding risks to businesses necessitates (at the very least) that relevant guidelines concerning their use in the workplace should be implemented by employers. All it takes to damage a business is for one employee to misplace their smartphone without having first activated their security settings.
[...] I’ve commented in previous posts, there are privacy risks associated with the use of PSDs. First of all, there have been numerous [...]