Synchronised smart phones: The collision of personal privacy and organisational data security

W Chigona

doi:10.4102/sajbm.v43i2.181

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore the organisational and individual motivations for incorporating personally-owned smart phones into the workplace and challenges arising from use; privacy and data security concerns of involved parties in the organisation. This study uses exploratory case study method and investigates privacy and security regarding personally-owned smart-phone usage in workplace. The study found that convenience, ease of use and access to emails were motives behind employees’ use of personal smart phones in the workplace. Further, employees have higher privacy expectation. Sample for this study was small to provide statistically meaningful results, Further research is needed to cover a larger case study spanning multiple organisations in other sectors. Mobile devices are creating challenges to organisational data security and employees’ right to information privacy. This study suggests that organisations need to reconsider data security and employees’ privacy policies to address possible conflict between data security and employees’ privacy.

Highlights

The increase in availabilty and capability of mobile phones has the valuable impact on business especially in developing countries where the availability of traditional internet is limited
The term ‘mobile device’ includes a wide range of products, but this paper focuses on smart phones
Our findings show that the convenience of using smart phones and having easy access to emails could be the strong motivations which influence the adoption and use of smart phones in South African

Summary

Introduction

The increase in availabilty and capability of mobile phones has the valuable impact on business especially in developing countries where the availability of traditional internet is limited. With the advent of smart phones, it is becoming common for employees to access organisation data through their mobile phones and synchronise their mobile phones with corporate email servers and save work-related documents (which may be confidential) onto their devices for convenient access (Goode, 2010) While this has the potential of increasing productivity and flexibility for the employees, it raises interesting privacy and security challenges for both the employee and the employer. Advances in technology which are making information more mobile and transferable than ever before are compounding this even further (Reeder, Karat, Karat & Brodie, 2007) If left unaddressed, this challenge has the potential to negatively affect the impact mobile phones may have on business

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