byod

Personal technology is starting to sync into modern day enterprise life, employees bring their own laptop in to demonstrate work, they view work email from their personal phone and their life is synced into one device.

For many, this simplifies everything – it makes the user not have to pull out a phone to ring a family member, then switch to read an email from a staff member, then pull out the other phone again to view Facebook.

However, for many using their work phone as their home phone, the situation could get nasty if that company ever runs into legal trouble and you may get your phone seized as evidence.

Bring your own device and the potential problems

“Bring your own device” is the new saying in many companies with simple syncing options and enterprise mobile applications employees can use on their personal phone.

This isn’t just a small circle of technology companies and employees embracing BYOD, Cisco Systems reported 42% of all knowledge workers bring their own smartphone to work, instead of using another.

Technology law experts have analyzed laws surrounding organization and have found an employee’s personal phone could be at risk of being seized in the event the company or employee is in trouble for legal reasons.

Seizing your personal phone

It may come as a big surprise to many this idea could be enacted, especially considering the private information legal teams could find while searching the phone for evidence.

With smartphones stores now coming with GPS, email, photos, video and messaging, it is very easy to see why this information could be necessary, especially if an employee does most of their work from the phone.

People have such close connections to their phones nowadays and the vast majority don’t even realize it until their phone is taken away. With GPS, email, messaging, note-taking, weather and a ton of other services running from the phone.

This legal ruling is pretty standard as well and appeals made by BYOD users hardly ever stand up in court. If you used your phone for any work activities, it is liable to be checked by legal teams for evidence.

Companies bringing measures into place

With this radical problem, organizations are now becoming much more active to detail employees on the problems with BYOD. Normally an employee will sign a contract acknowledging if the company does run into legal problems, the employee has to hand over the phone.

There are ways to show information without losing the smartphone. In company files, the information from the smartphone will be added and the company can then send this off to a legal team.

This means all the data from the employees’ personal smartphone is sent, without having to take the physical phone away. Christopher Dahl, who runs a digital document retrieval company called Lighthouse eDiscovery, states mobile phones are pretty uncommon pieces.

Two phones may be an option for those who really don’t want their personal phone checked. Personal information is important to many and they should be lectured on the possibilities before the problem arises.

BlackBerry recently introduced a system on BB10 allowing users to create a work/home divide. This is still open to rethink and we expect legal teams will not just allow BlackBerry users free roam, but it could be the start of the two phone divide.