[Phillip Dyson]

Originally Posted by Bob Anderson

As painful as it sounds, if the company provides your cell phone service, or provides you the phone, they are fully entitled to review any activity used on or by the device. I used to tell my staff: don't say, do or otherwise leave a trail of anything on corporate property that you wouldn't want to have to explain to a judge or lawyer one day.

If you use a company provided phone **OR** company provided service the bottom line what you do on it/with it is subject to company oversight.

This is the very reason why I am very careful what personal information I sync with my work Exchange. I use a person device and use Intellisync to only sync information with my companies name as a category to my work server. All of my personal stuff doesn't get synced.

Some people that I know do a complete sync with there work server. All contacts, all appointments and tasks. And they don't get why I make such a big deal about it. I don't know what I'll do when my device is no longer compatible with the last version of Intellisync. Neither Activesync or WMDC give me the two way category filtering.

[Phillip Dyson]

Originally Posted by Bob Anderson

As painful as it sounds, if the company provides your cell phone service, or provides you the phone, they are fully entitled to review any activity used on or by the device. I used to tell my staff: don't say, do or otherwise leave a trail of anything on corporate property that you wouldn't want to have to explain to a judge or lawyer one day.

If you use a company provided phone **OR** company provided service the bottom line what you do on it/with it is subject to company oversight.

This is the very reason why I am very careful what personal information I sync with my work Exchange. I use a person device and use Intellisync to only sync information with my companies name as a category to my work server. All of my personal stuff doesn't get synced.

Some people that I know do a complete sync with there work server. All contacts, all appointments and tasks. And they don't get why I make such a big deal about it. I don't know what I'll do when my device is no longer compatible with the last version of Intellisync. Neither Activesync or WMDC give me the two way category filtering.

[Twain]

Rocco,

I'm afraid I agree with Bob Anderson and others on this. If you are using a company provided phone, then your company has the right (hopefully with suitable reminders to employees) to "audit" email, text messages, phone logs, etc. If you are doing something with company property that would be embarrassing to you if the company found out, then you clearly should cease that activity. If you don't want text messages from your girlfriend/wife to end up on company servers, then tell them to use only your personal cell phone for text messages.

If you have a personal smartphone and don't want text messages to be backed up on Exchange servers, then I hope Microsoft offers an option not to synchronize or back up text messages.

Twain

[heliod]

First, I remembered same kinds of "big brother" concerns with web-proxy logs, and with logs of blackberries and any kinds of things like this in the past.

I have never heard of anybody using those features to check what users were doing, and even if they wanted to it is such a number of records that it is actually impossible to do any kind of control.

Second: all these features have always been configurable in EAS, so there is no doubt this one, if it really exists (as we can see above it is not sure they are really talking about syncing your SMS messages), will be configurable as well.

Third: maybe I will not be elegible for the title of "the most beloved guy in this forum" after this comment, but am I wrong on thinking that the only people who need to be concerned about this feature are the ones doing something with their phone that they shouldn't be doing? I don't think any employer is interested on messages you have been sending and receiving from your family, friends, or even lovers....

[Rocco Augusto]

Originally Posted by Bob Anderson

If you use a company provided phone **OR** company provided service the bottom line what you do on it/with it is subject to company oversight.

In my situations I have always purchased my own phones and was required to use the company's hosted Exchange for email. That is fine and I understand that which is why I never sent anything through company email I did not want anyone else to see. However I pay for my service and SMS package and since that has nothing to do with the company there is no reason that should be backed up. It is an invasion of privacy.

[Rocco Augusto]

Originally Posted by Twain

I'm afraid I agree with Bob Anderson and others on this. If you are using a company provided phone, then your company has the right (hopefully with suitable reminders to employees) to "audit" email, text messages, phone logs, etc.

If I worked for a company where they gave me a phone I would agree but every company I have ever worked for that had an Exchange server has required us to buy our own handsets.

Originally Posted by heliod

Third: maybe I will not be elegible for the title of "the most beloved guy in this forum" after this comment, but am I wrong on thinking that the only people who need to be concerned about this feature are the ones doing something with their phone that they shouldn't be doing? I don't think any employer is interested on messages you have been sending and receiving from your family, friends, or even lovers....

I am concerned about this feature, if it is really a feature, not because I'm afraid someone will see something they are not suppose to see, but instead because SMS messages have nothing to do with Exchange services whatsoever. Sure there is the potential for someone to see something you wouldn't want them to see in your text messages but someone could pick up your phone when your not around and start browsing through your data regardless.

If you're worried about someone finding out something they are not suppose to then maybe you shouldn't send that information over a digital channel to begin with

I guess the part of this that bothers me is that Exchange, that is if this is a feature, can pluck data off of your phone that you might not want them to take off and can store that data up in the cloud somewhere. Now what happens when they decide to go past SMS and start storing other information you might not want them to store? Also once your company has that data what is to stop them from going through it? Maybe I don't want my boss to know I had to stop by the store to pick up eggs.

Heck, and I know this is incredibly far fetched, but what is to stop your company from serving you ads based on your backed up data ala Gmail and Google with email? Granted that would probably never happen but the point is there is a lot they could do with the information that they are not privy too.

The real question is, if this is a feature, will it be able to be turned off on the device level for people that don't want this data backed up?

[Twain]

Originally Posted by Rocco Augusto

If I worked for a company where they gave me a phone I would agree but every company I have ever worked for that had an Exchange server has required us to buy our own handsets.

You do seem to be in a special category. It's hard for me to understand how a company would require you to buy your own handset and then mandate that you use their Exchange server! It seems like a company trying to have it both ways. I now totally understand your dilemma and I agree with your concern.

[Eriq Cook]

All though I do find it useful to be able to back up text messages and actually welcome this new feature, I would assume that companies can (and will) give users a choice to disable auto-sync of text messages. Except in highly regulated industries maybe. Only time will tell.

[Rocco Augusto]

Originally Posted by Twain

You do seem to be in a special category. It's hard for me to understand how a company would require you to buy your own handset and then mandate that you use their Exchange server!

When I wasn't doing freelance I spent a fair amount of time working for smaller start-ups that could not afford to pay the monthly phone bill but wanted us to have push email. So we would buy our phones and pay for our plans and use their servers for emails. Since it was web design and development, everyone who had a phone was going to pay for data regardless so it wasn't like we were being put out financially. It was a win win for everyone since we got to use what we wanted and they didn't have to pay for it