Were it me being asked to BYOD, I’d just go get me a $10 phone and hand it to them for MDM installation. I’d also expense my call plan.
Maybe 20+ years working in security has warped my perspective.
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I mean, I’ve only been working along side security, but there’s a non-insignificant number of corpsec I’ve met that I wouldn’t trust farther than I could throw them. There’s always at least one at every company I’ve been to.
It’s also that phones used to be perks. A lot of us are still getting used to the idea that the company will be tracking us offsite. (Because you can’t turn it off all the time… stupid oncall weeks)
I suppose so. Though personally location tracking was never my greater concern so much as just firewalling off my life from my work. Thinking back to my earliest on call days, I used to have two beepers, one for work and one for people I knew.
The firewalling is more difficult when someone else has root access to a portable camera/gps/audio recorder/accelerometer in your pocket.
I’ve carried managed phones for a few jobs, one where I was in charge of BCP so was on call 24x6. Theres this strange trick I learned: turn it off.
A friend of mine has two phones – an iPhone for personal use and a company-supplied Android for business calls. It’s very common to see him talking to a business associate while texting his family at the same time, or checking messages on both phones at once. It’d drive me bonkers.
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So now you want to get yelled at for turning your phone off when you’re on-call? They see that too, now.
Also When someone else has root, they could potentially attempt to turn it back on remotely.
believe me I fully understand what MDM can do with current phones. I’ve done the deployment and am familiar with both iOS and Android management capabilities.
Besides turning it off, theres also just disabling its radio functions for short periods. See also the gimick that Cory Doctorow came up with for Gibson’s novel Zero History.
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Multi-tasking at best i would say
I understand the need for a second phone when one phone is a company phone. But it seems that many of the people who use two phones have two private phones. At least it is the case for the work colleague I know to have two phones. I don’t know for strangers I see in the subway, of course.
Starting to think that this might be a good second phone:
Or the only one…
One of the features of that phone is that it will be linked to the phone number of your smartphone via an app.
If you just need a small dumb phone, they are easy enough to find for little money.
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I also remember an event that may shed some lights on the matter of privacy.
About a year ago, we had a young intern at work. She was an avid smartphone / facebook user.
One day, another colleague who, being over 50, is not into social media, wanted to show some pictures at the coffee break (nothing personal, some mushrooms he found). He selected the picture and passed the phone around. Everybody simply looked at the picture, but when came the turn of the intern, she started flipping at other pictures and commented that he had no pictures of his family, etc… The colleague found that a rude intrusion in his privacy and quickly retrieved his phone. The discussion between them slowly turned sour with the intern insisting that she did nothing wrong, that he should not have anything to hide and that all her pictures were on facebook where he could see them anyway.
But this is not the end of the story. We had another intern at the table, a young guy from Singapore. After the incident he asked me a few questions privately about what happened. From the discussion, I understood that he believed that the girl was right and that, apparently, when you lend a phone to a woman, you are supposed to expect her to check “what kind of friends you have” (his words). I found the idea surprising, but I failed to ask whether that was in the case of dating (which was not the case during that incident).
Somebody posted earlier about Japan. If the “phone check” is also done in Japan, maybe that explains why people have two?
I only know a handful of people with multiple phones in the US (usually a “good boy” phone and a “bad boy” phone), but literally everyone I know in Asia has multiple phones because they travel and each country requires different sim cards and even different technologies.
This is why I stopped allowing email on my phone, and suddenly people stopped emailing me so much and texted when they needed something. It ended up being great!
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[quote=“emo_pinata, post:34, topic:100680, full:true”]
I only know a handful of people with multiple phones in the US (usually a “good boy” phone and a “bad boy” phone)[/quote]
What exactly does this good boy / bad boy definition implies?
Well they need two phones to hide what they do on one of the phones, Lord only knows what that actually is. Not a line of questioning I was interested in hearing about be it cheating or gambling or whatever. One was because they had strict Muslim parents and wanted a clean phone for them to search and a phone to talk to his secret girlfriend and his friends on.
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Phone snooping seems like a social variable many people (and device designers and engineers in particular) would do well to take into account, considering the variety of cultures that use these things around the world.
I remember reading a “Android users give their opinion on the new iOS features” article, or somesuch, and the iPhone-using author was surprised to learn that someone absolutely hated a new feature that allowed quick access to the contacts most often used. The author had only considered it as a bit of convenience for the user, but the interviewee though it was too private a thing to automatically show to anyone who got their hands on their phone.
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I’ve heard that it’s common in Japan for people to have separate work and personal phones - the aesthetic as well as the functional aspect is important so one of them is supposed to be very sleek and small and minimal for work and the other one is a regular smartphone like most people have in the US.
