US House of Representatives Bans TikTok on Employee Smartphones – IT Professional – News

Anyway, I’m wondering why you have to have tiktok on your _work phone_; I don’t think you are really very professional with your job to run the country.

Employers have a knack for promoting a “business phone” as an added benefit.
They pretend it’s a gift and so people use it as if it were private. If this is not the intention (for understandable reasons), then such a phone is not a ‘gift’ but rather a ‘punishment’.

Somehow I think there is something to be said about the fact that if you want people to be reachable you have to motivate them to always carry their work phone with you and then allow them to use it privately. But then as an employer you shouldn’t expect too much from security or a separation of business and private.

Incidentally, if such a phone is really only there to be /called/ in an emergency with a “come to the shop now to help put out the fire”, then it doesn’t matter much what else the user does with it as long as that call continues to work.

Anecdote: I have a phone for the company whose number is known only to 3 people. Last year I received exactly 1 call. My employer protected the phone well with a solid case with big bumpers. As a result, the phone is three times thicker than my phone and is simply inconvenient to carry, especially as a second phone. Not a complaint as I chose it myself. Now comes the… the other day I lost my home phone and decided to call me from my work phone. Then it turned out it didn’t work, the details don’t matter, but I could have been walking around with a brick for nothing for weeks.

Well, I’m wrong, it can happen, but since I only use that phone for work, it took me a long time to find out. I’ve since put a private app on my work phone that I use every day and occasionally use it to view a website. That’s not the ideal separation of work and private life I’d like, but an almost necessary compromise.

Also of interest is the question of how reachable an employee should be. The fact that you can be called out of bed in an emergency is obviously part of your contract. But what about the 7:30am Saturday morning chat messages? You can put your private phone on silent if you don’t want to be woken up by a beep, but that’s obviously not the intention of a business phone.
Often there is a block/allow list of numbers/contacts that may or may not be restricted, but that only works for known numbers/contacts, and you typically have to set this up per person. Simply not taking your phone into the bedroom is also not possible.

Before you know it you’ll be walking around with 2 company phones… Again, no complaints, I choose this myself and being a little extreme in these matters is my job, but not everyone has that choice.

All of this is a pretty long way of saying I understand people doing private business on their work phone when everyone really realizes that’s not really the point.

[Reactie gewijzigd door CAPSLOCK2000 op 28 december 2022 14:00]