Paper 2: Privacy at work and with friends

Due: Sunday, April 5, 2009. Your paper must be submitted electronically, either via email or through the Blackboard digital dropbox. Unofficially you should probably shoot for ~1000 words in length, though there were some very good Paper 1's that were rather shy of that.

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 notify 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 information could get some people in trouble. And while she doesn't have any evidence yet, she's afraid that if she gets a manager in trouble then she will be in trouble too.

Ellen has a pretty good relationship with her boss, Geoff, but she still doesn't know what to do. Should she go straight to Geoff? Publicize her discovery within the company first? Leak the news privately, and hope everyone finds out through rumors? Say nothing at all? (Her knowledge of the GPS data is, after all, unofficial.) If she talks to Geoff, are there some things she should say in addition to the basic facts? Should she argue for some guidelines? Does the fact that the location fields are not "officially supported" make a difference?

Company policy allows employees to use the phones for personal calls after 7:00 pm; does this matter?

At about the same time, Ellen has been asked by her best friend Dora to help set up her high-end new phone, as Dora is not very tech-savvy. Dora's phone also has a GPS-logging feature, this time fully documented, and apparently there's no way to disable it. Ellen tells Dora there's a website that reports the phone location, and that Dora should choose a password there. Dora, though, says she's happy with whatever Ellen has set up and that she trusts Ellen. Finally, though, she agrees to change the password, but two weeks later Ellen checks (as she had promised Dora she would do) and discovers (a) that the password is still unchanged, and (b) that Dora has a placed a lot more late-night away-from-home calls than Ellen ever would have thought. What should Ellen do?

And how are the situations with Dora and with Geoff alike or different?

See also Baase, Section 6.5, on Employee Monitoring.