To be clear, and we seem to be approaching a middle-ground, I'm not against any and all technical measures of preventing corporate information leakage. But I do believe that there's a boundary, and it seems we agree here, as to how far that should be allowed to go. Unfettered access to all information on company owned devices as presented (sensationalized as it likely is) in the article that kicked off this discussion takes a flying leap over that boundary.
I wonder if I can pull you closer to my side of the middle by suggesting that it's reasonable for Apple to select for the 5th Generation iPhone engineers who are willing to undergo much more intrusive monitoring, especially if they are compensated for that.
Incidentally: drug testing is something you and I could bitch together about way into the night.
This is admittedly a tough one for me, because it brings it down to a choice between two things I'm not comfortable with:
- Corporate invasion of personal privacy
- Limiting a person's ability to choose to do things which I (or the government) think they shouldn't
My first swing at it was that I thought, "Ok, when the legal system much choose one side to protect, perhaps it should default to the weaker side; the side which is least likely to be under duress". But that's just sweet sounding bullshit that was a fancy way of saying, "As long as the weaker party actually wants what I would."
The best I can come up with, and this is oh-so-typically-German, is to say, "Ok, Apple still can't invade their privacy. But I'm fine with ratcheting up the legal repercussions of violating the trust of the employer."
In other words, I'd be fine if more things were promoted up from the level of contract violations and moved closer to the penalties for industrial espionage in an effort to provide a stronger legal deterrent for information leakage, and also to bring in a third-party arbiter (the courts) to decide when, as in any legal proceeding, additional search and seizure is warranted by just cause. (See, I knew I could work in the Fourth Amendment somehow.)
As noted, that is a typically German jurisprudential notion, and I did have to think it through some. (The question really for me is: did I end up here because I think this way? Or do I think this way because I ended up here? :-) )
