Harris Survey Exposes Concerns About Employee Privacy for BYOD

PHILADELPHIA, Sept. 27, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Fiberlink^®, the leader in cloud-based solutions for secure mobile device management (MDM) and mobile application management (MAM), today announced the results of a Harris survey revealing that business users are alarmed about employers' ability to access and collect personally identifiable information (PII) through mobile devices, such as iPhones, iPads and Androids.

As the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend sweeps across the business world, it raises a significant management challenge for companies and has implications that go beyond the IT department. Although many may not know it, some employers are able to track employee locations during work and non-work hours, which applications they've installed and review or delete personal pictures and music.

Location and app inventory information is available whenever employees "opt-in" to a mobile device management application – the solution that enables BYOD, security, policy enforcement, and app management for many organizations. The removal of personal files, pictures and music is also possible, even if the user is simply getting access to corporate email through Exchange ActiveSync. Unless they are specifically informed through an acceptable user agreement and mobile policy, many employees have no idea that this is possible.

The Fiberlink-commissioned Harris survey found that business users are overwhelmingly concerned, and would not allow employers to have this access into their personal lives.

The results show significant employee concern:

• 82 percent of respondents consider this ability to be "tracked" an invasion of their privacy. Tracking is easily accomplished through a number of technologies built into most of the popular smartphones. Tracking with an MDM solution can be accomplished using GPS and triangulation, which provides a company with a way to locate where a device is physically located.
• Similarly, 76 percent of respondents would not give their employer access to view what applications are installed on their personal device. What users install on their personal device is considered private information.
• 75 percent of respondents would not allow their employer to install an app on their personal phone which gives the company the ability to locate them during work and non-work hours in exchange for receiving corporate email and gaining access to other corporate resources.
• Business users expressed a great deal of concern about their employers looking into their lives. In fact, very few respondents expressed no concern.
  • 82 percent are concerned to extremely concerned about their employers tracking websites they browse on personal devices during non-work time
  • 86 percent are concerned to extremely concerned about the unauthorized deletion of their personal pictures, music, and email profiles
  • Only 15 percent are not at all concerned about employers tracking their location during non-work time
  • Only 15 percent are not at all concerned about employers tracking personal apps installed on their devices

"No other IT tool is attached at the hip or full of personal data quite like a smartphone or tablet," said Chris Hazelton, Research Director for Mobile & Wireless at 451 Research. "Because of this, it is critical that IT is able to provide a level of privacy where applicable, particularly around location and app usage, for the growing number of employees who are choosing to bring their own devices to work."

"Bring your Own Device policies are commonplace across most organizations. The survey results show that the vulnerability of personally identifiable information is a significant concern, and that organizations need to be just as concerned about user privacy as they are about the security of corporate data," said Christopher Clark, president at Fiberlink. "However, the situation can be easily solved by IT by using a mobile device management solution that can set Privacy Settings to stop collecting personal data from staff members, but these measures are rarely put in place."

Harris and Fiberlink also created an info graphic [link] to illustrate the results.

About Fiberlink

Fiberlink is the recognized leader in cloud solutions for secure enterprise mobile device and application management. Its cloud-based MaaS360 platform provides IT organizations with mobility intelligence and control over mobile devices, applications and content to enhance the mobile user experience and keep corporate data secure across smartphones, tablets and laptops. MaaS360 helps companies monitor the expanding suite of mobile operating systems, including Apple iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone. Named by Network World as the Clear Choice Test winner for mobile device management solutions and honored with the 2012 Global Mobile Award for "Best Enterprise Mobile Service" at Mobile World Congress, MaaS360 is used to manage and secure more than one million endpoints globally. For more information, please visit http://www.maas360.com.

© 2012 MaaS360 and the MaaS360 logo are trademarks of Fiberlink Communications and may be registered in certain jurisdictions. All other brand names are trademarks of their respective partners.

For Additional Information Contact:
Weber Shandwick for Fiberlink
Marika Knapp
[email protected]
P: 415-597-6809

SOURCE Fiberlink