This white paper explains how issuing smartphones or tablets to your employees can lead to lawsuits for your organization. If you fear potential legal repercussions because of your corporate mobile offering, please email info@leanmobility.ca and someone will respond to you within 24 hours. For more information visit www.leanmobility.ca

1. For additional articles and information visit leanmobility.ca
Did You Issue Smartphones to All of Your Employees? Here are
Two Reasons You Are About to Be Sued
Author: Kyron Baxter, CEO, Lean Mobility
So you’ve deployed your MDM platform of choice. You have an active fleet of iOS and
Android devices. You felt it was fair to offer both BYOD and corporate device programs
to employees. All is well in your organization.
Below are two nightmare scenarios that can easily happen to your organization unless
you are careful.
Please note: If you fear potential legal repercussions because of your corporate
mobile offering, please email info@leanmobility.ca and someone will respond to you
within 24 hours.
If you are having trouble understanding any of the terms used in this article, you should
stop and first read: http://bit.ly/2aZSkwQ

2. For additional articles and information visit leanmobility.ca
Scenario 1 - The Disgruntled employee
One day you get an email from HR that an employee is being terminated and is
disgruntled. You need to follow your standard termination processes with added
urgency. Since the employee’s device is corporately owned you wipe their device’s
data in its entirety, remotely and securely.
A week passes, you get an email from HR and management that you are CC’d on. The
employee lost personal data and is threatening to sue unless you can recover it. You
say to yourself “Huh? Our corporate offering only offers corporate apps. To top it off
how can I recover data from a device that was encrypted?”. The nightmare begins.
You find out that you were deploying a Password Keeper app that saves users’
personal passwords in an encrypted format to their device. The exported data was
encrypted using a proprietary format and so was the device it was stored on. You wave
the white flag and your company’s lawyers draw up a settlement agreement with the
former employee. Word leaks and you’re out a job.
The above story is not a hypothetical situation, I’ve seen it happen. Most companies do
not understand what it means when you offer your employees a piece of technology.
There is an expectation for support. By publishing an app to your corporate app store
you are making yourself liable unless you have covered yourself with a comprehensive
mobile policy.
BYOD devices are even worse. If you have not setup proper access controls and audit
trails, someone can accidentally wipe a BYOD device in your deployment. To make
matters worse Google and Apple have doubled down on security and likely you have
as well. You might have blocked cloud backup services like Dropbox and iCloud. You
also likely have implemented DLP (data loss prevention) software. Your BYOD user
could easily sue you if you accidentally wipe their photos of their children (which I have
also seen happen). Since Android and iOS have increased security measures, the
chances of being able to recover data are next to none.
This can make standard employee termination and device wipe processes a problem.

3. For additional articles and information visit leanmobility.ca
Scenario 2 – Employee Mobile Device Discrimination
You might have a complex deployment with legacy and even unreleased devices. I
have worked with clients where devices long unsupported by the manufacturer, are still
deployed in the field alongside soon to be released Android phones (very common in
telecoms).
We now live in a world where any discriminatory practice can have your company
trending on social media for days. This is not the exposure your company desires.
Imagine you have a deployment where you came up with a secure configuration
package for your mobile devices. This includes complex passwords, locking down
settings, disabling features such as Siri. For the average user this is fine. Most people
do not realize you need to have Siri enabled to have the phone dictate text to you. In
disabling Siri, you have stopped your visually impaired users from easily being able to
use the iPhone you provided them with.
One day one of your visually impaired users becomes irate with their inability to use Siri
on their company provided iPhone. You have no policy in place to make an exception
for them. You do not want to risk failing an audit. Your company takes very long to
create another group of configuration policies for them that would allow Siri. While
you’re spinning the wheels to try and resolve this issue, the visually impaired user runs
into a single parent who worked at the same company.
The single parent is struggling financially and uses an older BYOD device. They
constantly get locked out of their device because they have trouble typing in the
complex password you forced them to use on their smaller screen. Your support team
is not always the quickest in getting their device password reset. This effects their work
and they ended up getting fired.
The single parent teams up with the unhappy visually impaired user and files a
discrimination lawsuit against your company. The single parent who is now a former
employee, wouldn’t have had such an issue unlocking their iPhone if they could afford
one with a fingerprint scanner like you have provided to some of your other employees.
The two start a campaign on Twitter and generate public outcry. You lose the lawsuit
and end up paying a hefty settlement.
These are nightmare scenarios for any company.

4. For additional articles and information visit leanmobility.ca
Solutions:
1. A comprehensive device usage waiver. The idea is to set expectations and put
responsibilities back onto your end users.
2. Identifying holes in your BYOD, corporate owned and COPE device offerings.
3. Establishing TEM (telecom expense management) and MAM (mobile application
management). Having fair and auditable processes will help your drastically
decrease operating costs and decrease your mobile liabilities
If your company is struggling with these issues reach out to: info@leanmobility.ca
Some will reach out too you promptly to let you know how we can help you.
Also please visit http://www.leanmobility.ca/services to see if any our productized
services suit your needs.