Can text messages be seen by my husband's company on his phone and is it legal?
 

Hi All,

My husband travels frequently for work and has a blackberry as a company phone on the Sprint network. We often text message back forth when we are unable to talk, sometimes of a personal nature. We were both under the impression that deleted text messages couldn't be seen by an outside party. Recently the IT person at his office has been making strange comments as if he knows something about our personal conversations. I have two questions: 1. Is it possible for the content of text messages to be retrieved by his company? 2. Is it legal for them to do this?

I really appreciate your help, thanks.

As for the technical aspects of capturing or recording the messages- I am not qualified to answer that. However I strongly suspect they would be capable of performing that function mbecause I know it can be perfomred on computers. Deleted means nothing...

As for the legality...If they are providing the phone - it is their phone and all information contained within is their property and they are entitled to do most anything they want that pertains to that phone. It is just like a work computer...you have no right to assume any kind of privacy or personal confidentiality and anything contained on the computer is fully accessible and is the property of the company. Period!




David

Yes it is and yes it is if your husband's BB is connected to a BES server. If his phone is BIS only, the answer is no. As stated, the phone is their property (if they paid for it and are directly paying the bill) and the message status (deleted or not) has no impact on their ability to access the content on BES. Email and SMS (or any non encrypted communication) travels through their server.

If his phone is only connected to a BIS server then the company has no access to the SMS messages. Now, assuming that the phone is connected to a BES server, would it be a violation of company policy for some IT pimple face to be reading through those messages and using the contents in any way? I would guess that it would be.

Definitely.

We always advise this: if you consider something to be private and personal then keep it entirely off any company BES-connected BB.