If You Use Your Personal Phone for Work, Say Goodbye to Your Privacy
The recent firing of a Google employee demonstrates how you relinquish your privacy — and private data, including personal photos — when you put work accounts on your personal device
By Sean Captain
The Bill of Rights covers only what the government can do to you. Unless you work for the government, many of your rights to free speech and freedom from search and seizure stop when you walk in, or log in, to your job. “If you’re on your employer’s communications equipment, you’ve got virtually no privacy in theory and absolutely none in practice,” says Lew Maltby, head of the National Workrights Institute.
The lack of workplace digital privacy has become a hot topic with the recent firing of four Google employees for what Google says were violations such as unauthorized accessing of company documents and the workers say was retaliation for labor organizing or criticizing company policies. One of them, Rebecca Rivers, recounts how her personal Android phone went blank when she learned that she’d been placed on administrative leave in early November. (Google subsequently fired Rivers.)
