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Anyway, as was pointed out, we're dealing with an exceedingly rare set of 'ifs' here.

If this business needs to have someone available on RIGHT FETHING NOW notice, then they should pay people to bunk over at the building, Fireman style. Pay them a bonus, feed them well, and have like half a dozen of them that rotate in and out every few days. It's a burden but they get their people OMG READY TO GO and know where they are and nobody needs to be tagged 24/7 to do it.

Or have a selection of several such people with an understanding that 1 must ALWAYS be ready to go and sort that out in X hour 'shifts', preferably with mixed time zones so nobody is getting called at 2am.

If this is such a big money business with such vital needs, they can pay up for the right to have someone on call for long stretches of the day.

But if instead their boss just gets off on knowing where people are and watching them travel about their day, ooooh look, someone's at that bar again, I wonder if they'll end up home by the end of the night, or perhaps in a building they've never been before...

Yeah, no, that's not going to fly.

And for feth's sake, I'm pretty sure *ACTUAL REACTOR TECHS* don't have to deal with this bullgak. Presumably they have staff on duty 24/7, on-call specialists, etc.

That's a reason to carefully and very clearly sort out everyone's vacation schedule.

Not a reason to bloody microchip them.

I'd say the key thing here is not the monitoring app as there are jobs where it would be useful/essential (she knew what she was getting into when she signed up)

but the indications that management where discussing her private life activities with her co-workers... as long as she was wherever was OK based on her contact management has no right to talk about her out of hours stuff with anybody

It'll be interesting to see what the contract says, and whether it is permissible in CA. Personally I don't think it is reasonable that her employer can track her movements outside of work. It opens up the potential for highly unethical and abusive conduct. By all means ensure that you employees are contactable, but knowing what speed they are driving 3 hours after they are off the clock is an excessive intrusion.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Personally I think all employees should be continually monitored for when and how much sex they have.

If you are having a lot of athletic sex, it increases the chance you may be too tired to work at full pace during company time.

But by the same token the employee's stress levels are probably a lot lower, and it does count as exercise so less sick days and healthier employees.

D-Usa has the right of things. If she works off that phone the company has a strong interest in making sure it's secure. It sounds like the person is incidental frankly. They want to monitor the phone, you are obliged to keep the phone with you... Absent a douchey boss I see no problem, and even with one she handled the situation poorly and I would say the firing was just if not necessarily right.

So, it is alright to fire somebody for removing an application that violated their personal time/privacy and gave her boss the ability to know where she is at all times of the day just because she signed a paper which clearly violates her right to privacy?

Stuff the "hypotheticals". She's not a Nuke Tech. I don't deny that there may be some job that requires you to be tracked, but If you want to discuss the requirements for such a job, start another thread.

 Dreadwinter wrote:
So, it is alright to fire somebody for removing an application that violated their personal time/privacy and gave her boss the ability to know where she is at all times of the day just because she signed a paper which clearly violates her right to privacy?

This is the key. Just because she signed a paper, doesn't make it right or legal. It will clearly be up to the court to decide whether it is so, but there's a very good chance that they will say the company had no right to track her 24/7.

If you want the phone to be 100% secure, then have her leave it at the office.
If you want her to keep the phone with her 24/7, don't violate her privacy.

The company will likely have to reach a pretty high bar to prove that it was absolutely necessary for her to both have the phone and to be constantly trackable.

That depends on what they fired her for. If they fired her for not being trackable then the bar is high. If they fired her for tampering with company property the bar will be lower.

Remember, part of her lawsuit claimed retaliation. That makes things more complicated.

Employees (the boss?) making jokes about knowing her every move can't be helpful in any attempt to prove it was purely a business matter.

As part of my duties I can track thousands of people who work in roughly a dozen office towers. Depending on a few circumstances, I could probably tell you when they took lunch, when they went to the washroom, when they got in every morning and possibly even when they went home at night.

I would absolutely be gak-canned if I ever used/abused that system/knowledge. And joking with one of those employees about how I knew where she was all the time would probably be the first step in a long series of unpleasant conversations with HR (on my way out) and quite probably the police (I'm pretty sure there's federal or at least provincial privacy legislation I'd be walking all over doing so).

It's part of my job, but that doesn't mean it's my personal plaything. That information is a responsibility, and I treat it responsibly.

The idea of flaunting even more personal data, from outside work hours, when that person was off premises, for no reason but a laugh, is despicable. Even IF (biiiig IF) it's legal to compile such data off the clock, abusing it as described in the article originally linked treads well beyond simply having a security requirement for a job.

 Forar wrote:
Employees (the boss?) making jokes about knowing her every move can't be helpful in any attempt to prove it was purely a business matter.

As part of my duties I can track thousands of people who work in roughly a dozen office towers. Depending on a few circumstances, I could probably tell you when they took lunch, when they went to the washroom, when they got in every morning and possibly even when they went home at night.

I would absolutely be gak-canned if I ever used/abused that system/knowledge. And joking with one of those employees about how I knew where she was all the time would probably be the first step in a long series of unpleasant conversations with HR (on my way out) and quite probably the police (I'm pretty sure there's federal or at least provincial privacy legislation I'd be walking all over doing so).

It's part of my job, but that doesn't mean it's my personal plaything. That information is a responsibility, and I treat it responsibly.

The idea of flaunting even more personal data, from outside work hours, when that person was off premises, for no reason but a laugh, is despicable. Even IF (biiiig IF) it's legal to compile such data off the clock, abusing it as described in the article originally linked treads well beyond simply having a security requirement for a job.

But if I decided to somehow gain administrative privileges on my work desktop and delete or install software to circumvent the systems my company uses I would get fired since it's not my property to modify.

Don't get me wrong now, I think that she shouldn't be required to be live tracked 24/7. But her problem with the tracking didn't give her permission to modify her employer's equipment.

Should have did a Snowden and stuck the cell in a fridge

Yeah, if I got administrative rights for my work laptop and decided to throw Steam on there, a pile of games, and disabled a couple of security features (like our truly aggressive firewall and anti-virus programs), I'd probably be talking to HR too.

What I think will be interesting is whether or not it's legal to track her in the first place. Given how screwed up the US legal system can be, I wouldn't expect it to protect her from every possible liability, but I'd also consider it a pretty extenuating circumstance as well.

The question isn't going to be whether or not it's legal to track her, the question is going to be whether or not it's legal for a company to track it's property that just so happens to be something she is (probably) contractually obligated to keep on her person. And I have a pretty strong suspicion that that answer will be yes.

I'm pretty sure she is boned on this one. The proper way to do this would have been to file some HR complaint stuff and/or make a big deal about the boss's attitude and comments, and then when her douchebag boss fired her for that, sue. And she would have a much stronger case.

She said something to her boss about them monitoring her off hours and it being illegal. Her boss told her she should allow them to do it anyways. Tampering with company equipment kinda went out the window when she asked that the gps service be off when she isn't on the clock and he said deal with it.

That isn't really how laws work. If my boss tells me I am no longer going to be allowed OSHA mandated breaks I don't get to start stealing office supplies.

 Bromsy wrote:
That isn't really how laws work. If my boss tells me I am no longer going to be allowed OSHA mandated breaks I don't get to start stealing office supplies.

What about burning the place down?

 d-usa wrote:

 Bromsy wrote:
That isn't really how laws work. If my boss tells me I am no longer going to be allowed OSHA mandated breaks I don't get to start stealing office supplies.

What about burning the place down?

Well obviously that'd be fine.

 Bromsy wrote:

 d-usa wrote:

 Bromsy wrote:
That isn't really how laws work. If my boss tells me I am no longer going to be allowed OSHA mandated breaks I don't get to start stealing office supplies.

What about burning the place down?

Well obviously that'd be fine.

Excellent...

What else does that app track? e-mails? photo's? access to camera, stalker bosses rejoice!

 Bromsy wrote:
That isn't really how laws work. If my boss tells me I am no longer going to be allowed OSHA mandated breaks I don't get to start stealing office supplies.

How about you take the breaks anyways? What happens then? I feel like that is much closer to what has happened. Stealing is a long stretch.

I have a Company Phone, and I have to keep it with me outside of work all the time.

There is an APP that can "Track" the phone, but it's not turned on 24/7. This would be used if it was stolen or something happened.

Having a Tracking APP on at all times like that is a pretty gross breach of privacy in my opinion. The fact that the boss mentioned he knows how fast she drives... I mean come on.

 Dreadwinter wrote:

 Bromsy wrote:
That isn't really how laws work. If my boss tells me I am no longer going to be allowed OSHA mandated breaks I don't get to start stealing office supplies.

How about you take the breaks anyways? What happens then? I feel like that is much closer to what has happened. Stealing is a long stretch.

No, because as I've been saying, the app's purpose is to track the phone, not the employee. That is incidental, despite how her douchey boss was talking. The phone is company property. She was aware that they wanted this app on the phone. Choosing to delete it was wrong.

Your boss being an insufferable douche does not mean that you then get to do whatever you want, that's some "two wrongs make a right." style argument. Make a stink with HR, maybe change company policy, maybe get fired anyways. Either way, at least you are in the right then, and people don't have to argue this crap on the internet.

 Bromsy wrote:

 Dreadwinter wrote:

 Bromsy wrote:
That isn't really how laws work. If my boss tells me I am no longer going to be allowed OSHA mandated breaks I don't get to start stealing office supplies.

How about you take the breaks anyways? What happens then? I feel like that is much closer to what has happened. Stealing is a long stretch.

No, because as I've been saying, the app's purpose is to track the phone, not the employee. That is incidental, despite how her douchey boss was talking. The phone is company property. She was aware that they wanted this app on the phone. Choosing to delete it was wrong.

Your boss being an insufferable douche does not mean that you then get to do whatever you want, that's some "two wrongs make a right." style argument. Make a stink with HR, maybe change company policy, maybe get fired anyways. Either way, at least you are in the right then, and people don't have to argue this crap on the internet.

How is she in the wrong exactly? She protected her right to privacy after her boss grossly infringed upon it and when she told him it was illegal, her direct supervisor, she was told to deal with it. She could have gone to HR and made a big stink of it, but how long does that take? How long will it take for the policy to get changed? Maybe it never does, maybe they decide that she can deal with it, like her boss said. Then where is she at?

Stop with the above it all attitude, this is the internet.

If your boss tells you to no longer look at Dakka at work you don't get to 'disagree' by changing the programs on your work computer.

She had lots of ways she could have addressed this, with all of which would probably still result in her getting fired at some point, which would have left her with better legal recourse. But the moment she started to mess with company property they had a legitimate reason for firing her.

 Dreadwinter wrote:

 Bromsy wrote:

 Dreadwinter wrote:

 Bromsy wrote:
That isn't really how laws work. If my boss tells me I am no longer going to be allowed OSHA mandated breaks I don't get to start stealing office supplies.

How about you take the breaks anyways? What happens then? I feel like that is much closer to what has happened. Stealing is a long stretch.

No, because as I've been saying, the app's purpose is to track the phone, not the employee. That is incidental, despite how her douchey boss was talking. The phone is company property. She was aware that they wanted this app on the phone. Choosing to delete it was wrong.

Your boss being an insufferable douche does not mean that you then get to do whatever you want, that's some "two wrongs make a right." style argument. Make a stink with HR, maybe change company policy, maybe get fired anyways. Either way, at least you are in the right then, and people don't have to argue this crap on the internet.

How is she in the wrong exactly? She protected her right to privacy after her boss grossly infringed upon it and when she told him it was illegal, her direct supervisor, she was told to deal with it. She could have gone to HR and made a big stink of it, but how long does that take? How long will it take for the policy to get changed? Maybe it never does, maybe they decide that she can deal with it, like her boss said. Then where is she at?

Stop with the above it all attitude, this is the internet.

She is in the wrong for disabling security features on company property. I don't know how to boil this down any further than I have. Both parties were/are wrong. Her boss was a douche and should never have acted as he did. If she had done things right, this would be an open and shut case in her favor, she did not do things right. If she works for a financial company and does business on that phone, which is company property, they have a vested interest in keeping that phone secure. They are allowed to determine for themselves what they feel 'secure' is. She does not have the right to personally decide that the company is doing something illegal and take steps to remedy that herself. She was justly fired. If you tell your supervisor that they are doing something illegal and they blow you off, you do not then gain the right to resolve that issue however you see fit. That is silly.

This isn't an emotional issue, it is a legal one. Feeling like your privacy was violated is worth exactly dick all if you don't do anything to document it or pursue that through legal channels and your only action is to violate company policy.

That said, I'm sure she'll get at least some money out of this because it's cheaper to pay her to shut up than retain lawyers for long.

 Bromsy wrote:

She is in the wrong for disabling security features on company property.

job-management Xora app

www.xora.com

Xora Mobile Workforce Management
As the leader in the mobile workforce management, Xora products enables businesses to better manage their field employees. Xora is the only solution built from ground up with best-in-class apps (maps, timesheets, forms, jobs, mileage) that are integrated to work together. Take a look at the various products Xora supports and see if one is right for you.

It's not a security app, its a workforce management app. The point IS to track employees, not the phone. It's not security. You can do that without an installed app with "find my iPhone". They installed this app specifically to track staff. She objected, her boss told her to "deal with it".

 Bromsy wrote:
If you tell your supervisor that they are doing something illegal and they blow you off, you do not then gain the right to resolve that issue however you see fit. That is silly.

Actually, in many cases, yes you do have an obligation to prevent illegal activity, both directly and indirectly. If my boss or my company is doing something illegal my professional ethics require me to not facilitate it, report it and if possible take action to prevent it. Same with many professions, and I could lose my accreditation if I do not. If my boss told me to give someone a bribe I would be well within my rights to refuse, report it and block the account to prevent him getting someone else to do it. Now, this case is not that clear cut, but we don't know what action she took as there is scant detail on exactly what form the complaints to the company took or the situation regarding apps on the phone, but it is not a case of "do what your boss tells you", especially at higher levels.

 Steve steveson wrote:

 Bromsy wrote:

She is in the wrong for disabling security features on company property.

job-management Xora app

www.xora.com

Xora Mobile Workforce Management
As the leader in the mobile workforce management, Xora products enables businesses to better manage their field employees. Xora is the only solution built from ground up with best-in-class apps (maps, timesheets, forms, jobs, mileage) that are integrated to work together. Take a look at the various products Xora supports and see if one is right for you.

It's not a security app, its a workforce management app. The point IS to track employees, not the phone. It's not security. You can do that without an installed app with "find my iPhone". They installed this app specifically to track staff. She objected, her boss told her to "deal with it".

 Bromsy wrote:
If you tell your supervisor that they are doing something illegal and they blow you off, you do not then gain the right to resolve that issue however you see fit. That is silly.

Actually, in many cases, yes you do have an obligation to prevent illegal activity, both directly and indirectly. If my boss or my company is doing something illegal my professional ethics require me to not facilitate it, report it and if possible take action to prevent it. Same with many professions, and I could lose my accreditation if I do not. If my boss told me to give someone a bribe I would be well within my rights to refuse, report it and block the account to prevent him getting someone else to do it. Now, this case is not that clear cut, but we don't know what action she took as there is scant detail on exactly what form the complaints to the company took or the situation regarding apps on the phone, but it is not a case of "do what your boss tells you", especially at higher levels.

Tracking the location of the work phone is de facto security. Do you really think they won't make that argument in arbitration? And this isn't a clearly illegal thing. This is not telling her she must keep child porn on her work phone or else, this is her feeling like her privacy was being violated and deciding she didn't have to do that. As has been pointed out, there were multiple ways to handle this that wouldn't have involved her taking the offensive app off her phone and each of them would have been a better solution and left her with a stronger case for recompense and/or changed the policy for the betterment of all.

 Jehan-reznor wrote:
What else does that app track? e-mails? photo's? access to camera, stalker bosses rejoice!

Don't use your company phone for sexting?

It seems from the arricle that discussions were had with her boss to complain about the intrusion and she effectively told to put up with it whatever the legality. We don't know what other actions she took prior to her removing the software from the phone, she may have taken several of the steps outlined by other people.

 Bromsy wrote:

 Steve steveson wrote:

 Bromsy wrote:

She is in the wrong for disabling security features on company property.

job-management Xora app

www.xora.com

Xora Mobile Workforce Management
As the leader in the mobile workforce management, Xora products enables businesses to better manage their field employees. Xora is the only solution built from ground up with best-in-class apps (maps, timesheets, forms, jobs, mileage) that are integrated to work together. Take a look at the various products Xora supports and see if one is right for you.

It's not a security app, its a workforce management app. The point IS to track employees, not the phone. It's not security. You can do that without an installed app with "find my iPhone". They installed this app specifically to track staff. She objected, her boss told her to "deal with it".

 Bromsy wrote:
If you tell your supervisor that they are doing something illegal and they blow you off, you do not then gain the right to resolve that issue however you see fit. That is silly.

Actually, in many cases, yes you do have an obligation to prevent illegal activity, both directly and indirectly. If my boss or my company is doing something illegal my professional ethics require me to not facilitate it, report it and if possible take action to prevent it. Same with many professions, and I could lose my accreditation if I do not. If my boss told me to give someone a bribe I would be well within my rights to refuse, report it and block the account to prevent him getting someone else to do it. Now, this case is not that clear cut, but we don't know what action she took as there is scant detail on exactly what form the complaints to the company took or the situation regarding apps on the phone, but it is not a case of "do what your boss tells you", especially at higher levels.

Tracking the location of the work phone is de facto security. Do you really think they won't make that argument in arbitration? And this isn't a clearly illegal thing. This is not telling her she must keep child porn on her work phone or else, this is her feeling like her privacy was being violated and deciding she didn't have to do that. As has been pointed out, there were multiple ways to handle this that wouldn't have involved her taking the offensive app off her phone and each of them would have been a better solution and left her with a stronger case for recompense and/or changed the policy for the betterment of all.

It's not a security app though. Is a workforce tracking app. It's not sold as a security app. What use is a tracking app that can be removed, especially when smartphones have built in security tracking. Calling it a security thing is nonsense and just trying to justify what the company were doing. I don't know what arguments were made, I didn't make any comments about what arguments were made when, just saying that your discription of the app as security was wrong.

You gave an absolute saying:

 Bromsy wrote:
If you tell your supervisor that they are doing something illegal and they blow you off, you do not then gain the right to resolve that issue however you see fit. That is silly.

And as I said, we don't know what action was taken. Perhaps she felt it was the only way to get action, or perhaps she didn't think there would be any repercussions and the company rather than saying "your not aloud to do that. Put the app back on" just sacked her on the spot. We don't know the details and giving the absolute you did is wrong.