One of the newly realized drawbacks of the BYOD movement is corporate litigation. Business consumers may think because they own the device it would never be included in a search and seizure, but it's becoming more and more clear that is not the case. NBC News columnist, Bob Sullivan, recently interviewed several legal experts specific to mobile device law.
Michael R. Overly, a technology law expert in Los Angeles says this:
"You would be very surprised to hear that even extremely sophisticated business people seem shocked when they learn their personal phone, including email, GPS data, photos ... may be subject to review in litigation involving their employer…"
Giri Sreenivas, a mobile phone security expert at Boston-area firm Rapid7, then says this:
"The No. 1 thing you can do to ensure your device is not subject to seizure is to remove any sort of company account ... and then inform the company it's been removed…"
The full article is here: Use your personal smartphone for work email? Your company might take it
Remove any sort of company account? Doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose of BYOD completely? In some recent cases, the business consumer's personal device was taken to be reviewed to see if relevant case material was present and not returned for six months.
Once again, it seems, logic is replaced by greed by an industry clawing hard to create a viable market.
You may have noticed I've been covering BYOD quite a bit lately. It's due to my efforts to educate IT to help management make better decisions and not get caught making poor judgments due to vendor perks or a CIO reading an article in an inflight magazine.
In case you missed it, take a look at our recent BYOD coverage to help tie this all together:
The BYOD Risks are growing. Businesses Don’t Care, Says Symantec
