Ellen is in charge of the company-issued cellphones at work. All the field employees are issued cellphones, and Ellen keeps track of billing, repairs, and technical problems. She receives all the electronic records regarding phone use.
One day Ellen is on the phone with Frank in the cellular provider's tech support, tracking down a problem with three phones last week. The conversation goes something like this:
Ellen: But doesn't this field here have something to do with
the phone's serial number? I notice it's the same for each call
made on the same phone.
Frank: No, no, that field is the GPS coordinates for where
the call was placed.
The latitude starts in column 54, and the longitude follows.
If each phone in your set has the same numbers, it must be because each phone
is consistently used in the same place.
Ellen: That would be about right in for these particular phones ....
Frank: But I bet if you checked
records of more phones you'd see ... actually, I probably wasn't
supposed to tell you any of this; never mind.
After hours, Ellen thinks hard about what Frank said. She plays around with a little java, and within two days has a way of taking a set of phone records and generating a googlemaps plot of where each call originated. Ellen is tickled to see her own phone show up at her office, at the restaurant where she had lunch, at the grocery store, and at her home.
The following week Ellen hears that there's a new policy on regularly reporting your location; clearly management would be interested in this feature.
But then Ellen is struck by some concerns. The first is whether or not management would tell anyone that they can track employees by cell-phone usage; she really doesn't want to be the person who brought surreptitious monitoring to her workplace.
The second concern is that the monitoring would be retroactive; she discovers that the GPS coordinates have been in the billing records for almost a year. And she's heard rumors that this could get some people in trouble.
As a further experiment, she checks on some of the managers' locations during a recent contract push, and discovers some inconsistencies. At this point Ellen is worried that her own job could be in jeopardy, if she ends up embarassing someone high-up.
Ellen has a pretty good relationship with her boss, but she still doesn't know what to do. Should she go straight to her boss? Publicize her discovery within the company first? Leak the news privately, and hope everyone finds out through rumors? Delete the old phone-location records? She has, after all, never been told to keep them. If she talks to her boss, are there some things she should say in addition to the basic facts? Should she argue for some guidelines, or for deletion of the old records? Does the fact that the location fields are not "officially supported" make a difference? Should she bring up the company policy that employees are allowed to use the phones for personal calls after 7:00 pm? Or should she just keep quiet about the whole thing?