Personal Items on Corporate Assets

Privacy Digest passes along the laments of several folks who have lost their jobs and then found themselves missing their personal contact lists and family photos when the IT group wiped the former-employees computers and Blackberry devices.

I take this as a rather serious indictment of our efforts to get people to realize that company technology assets belong to the firm, not to the employee, and therefore anything you load on them also belongs to the corporation.

As we become more and more dependent on technology to keep our lives in order, finding a secure way to maintain this information somewhere other than on an employer's network should be a valuable marketing niche.

I'm particularly careful to keep my personal and professional appointments separate, with placeholders where needed to ensure my two calendars are in sync. But I don't transfer the information about business meetings and contacts to my personal calendar, and I limit personal events placed on my corporate calendar to only those placeholders needed to ensure I don't schedule over a personal event.

I also don't keep personal documents, photos, and other similar items on my work laptop or Blackberry. If I need those materials to be portable and available, they either go on my iPhone or on an encrypted USB drive that I carry around for exactly that purpose.

Technology makes it easy to blur the line for convenience sake. It takes proactive focusing to ensure you don't fall into the same trap as those in the article.

Wiped Out: Along with Jobs, Laid-off Lose Photos, Emails