The Prosecution Calls Your Smartphone to the Stand

Or Bring-Your-Own-Defendant

A very real legal situation is brewing is the wake of the bring your own device phenomena. #eDiscovery.  You might be familiar with some of the various legal or liability issues that should be addressed with a BYOD policy, like privacy, the loss of personal information, working overtime or the fact that financial responsibility may dictate legal obligation. 

Now, technology law experts are saying that if your company is involved in litigation, criminal or civil, personal mobile devices that were used for work email or other company activity, could be confiscated and examined for evidence as part of the investigation or discovery process.   So if you use your personal smartphone for work related activities and your company is involved in a lawsuit, there may come a point where the court might subpoena your phone to see what relevant evidence might be contained.  During litigation, the organization itself may have the legal obligation to sift through your mobile device for related information. If sued, companies are required to make a good-faith effort to retrieve data - where ever that may be.  That includes your email, GPS history, text messages, cell phone records, social media accounts, pictures and any other info that could be pertinent to the case.  This is proprietary company owned data that resides on my personally owned device.  This is especially true of your corporate email co-mingles with your personal email - meaning delivered through the same email app or program.  In fact, according to this article, a judge recently sanctioned a company for a discovery violation because it did not search the BYOD devices during discovery.

Some people seem to lose all sense of daily human functioning when social networks like Facebook, Twitter and others are unavailable for a short period of time.  We've become so attached to our mobile devices and they have become the center of our lives...imagine not having that pacifier for a few days.  OMG, I've time-traveled the 1980's and have no way of announcing it to the world!!  What am I going to do now that I can't re-tweet that funny cat picture!  I'm so lost without you, oh electronic appendage.

As more organizations embrace or even require BYOD in the workplace, it becomes even more critical to be able to separate personal and work profiles.  It is important that the corporate data and apps do not mingle with the already present personal data.  Solutions like F5's Mobile App Manager provides a fully enclosed virtual enterprise workspace and creates a secure footprint on the device for enterprise data and access only.  MAM allows organizations to safely separate personal data and usage from corporate oversight and controls how employees access key corporate information.

ps

Related:

• Use your personal smartphone for work email? Your company might take it
• BYOD Lawsuits Loom as Work Gets Personal
• BYOD and Delta Airlines Privacy Lawsuit
• BYOD gets messy with AT&T class action lawsuit
• Is BYO Already D?
• BYOD Policies – More than an IT Issue Part 1: Liability
• BYOD Policies – More than an IT Issue Part 2: Device Choice
• BYOD Policies – More than an IT Issue Part 3: Economics
• BYOD Policies – More than an IT Issue Part 4: User Experience and Privacy
• BYOD Policies – More than an IT Issue Part 5: Trust Model
• BYOD 2.0: Moving Beyond MDM (pdf)
• Inside Look: F5 Mobile App Manager

Technorati Tags: ediscovery,legal,courts,litigation,byod,discovery,lawsuit,policy,liability,silva,f5,mam,mobile device,smartphone

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Parking Ticket Privacy

Imagine getting a $20 parking ticket and then filing suit against the issuing municipality for exposing too much personal information on that ticket.  That’s exactly what Jason Senne did after receiving a $20 parking ticket in 2010 for illegally parking his car overnight in the Chicago ‘burb of Palatine, Ill.  His name, address, driver's license number, date of birth, height and weight all appeared on the ticket, which was placed on his windshield in full public view.  Senne's complaint alleged that disclosure of his identity was in violation of the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act of 1994 (DPPA).  DPPA requires that all states protect a driver's name, address, phone number, Social Security number, driver identification number, photograph, height, weight, gender, age, and specific medical or disability information.  Congress passed the privacy legislation in response to the death of actress Rebecca Schaeffer.  She was killed by a stalker who had gotten her unlisted home address through the California DMV.  In Senne’s case, initially a federal judge found that an exception for law enforcement protected the village's actions, and a 3-judge panel of the 7th Circuit affirmed that last year.  Senne pushed and the full federal appeals court agreed to rehear the case.  Last week, the full federal appeals court decided Monday that ‘the parking ticket at issue here did constitute a disclosure regulated by the DPPA.’

In a 7-4 ruling, the appeals court said that it didn’t matter if someone walking by happened to notice the personal info – just the fact that it was exposed in such a public manner was enough.  The earlier district court decision, in favor of Palatine Village, was based on the notion that a ‘disclosure’ was when an entity turned over information to someone else without consent and was not considered disclosure.  In this case, there was no direct handoff, just the ticket flapping on the windshield/wiper blade in plain sight.  In the overturned ruling, the divided court  felt that there was real risk, safety and security concerns at stake.  A stalker looking for a target could just hang out where overnight parking is banned and collect a bunch of potential victim’s info for future harassment.  The recent court’s interpretation of the law might also expose Palatine to a hefty $80 million fine.  Since there is a 4 year statute of limitations on private lawsuits and each privacy violation carries a $2500 penalty, all those tickets issued during that time frame with the protected info could be in play.

It’s an interesting case about privacy and how others, without malicious intent, may expose personal, sensitive details about an individual.  While identity theft due to electronic means, like data breaches, is on the rise, stolen wallets or physical documents (dumpster diving) still account for a good percentage of ID theft crimes.  Back in 2009, a Javelin study indicated that stolen wallets and physical documents accounts for 43% of all identity theft (pdf) which means we still need to shred our printed materials. 

ps

References:

• Privacy Issue in Parking Tickets, Full Circuit Says
• Appeals court reinstitutes parking ticket lawsuit against Palatine
• Detailed Parking Tickets Breach Personal Privacy, Appeals Court Says
• Court Says Parking Tickets Could Be Illegal
• Senne v. Village of Palatine
• Driver Information Can Be Sold for Commercial Use Under DPPA (FindLaw's Seventh Circuit Blog)
• Driver's Privacy Protection Act Seems Fairly Useless (FindLaw's Sixth Circuit Blog)
• Dumpster Diving vs. The Bit Bucket

Technorati Tags: F5, smartphone, integration, byod, Pete Silva, security, business, education, technology, application delivery,ipad,mobile device, context-aware,android, iPhone, web, internet, security

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Got a SSN I can Borrow?

Apparently, I can use my own name and your Social Security Number to get a job or buy a car and it is not an identity theft crime.  Really.  This is according to a recent Colorado Supreme Court ruling.  They ruled that, ‘that using someone else’s Social Security number is not identity theft as long as you use your own name with it.’  Seriously.  The case in question involved a man who used his real name but someone else’s Social Security number to obtain a car loan.  The court said that since he used his real name, along with other identifiable pieces of information, he wasn’t trying to impersonate someone else.  The SSN info was just the ‘lender’s’ requirement and not a ‘legal’ requirement.  The defendant said that he fully intended to pay the loan back and wasn’t trying to avoid the bills.  There was another case where a man used a fake SSN to get a job at a steel plant in Illinois.  He presented a Social Security card with his name but a fake SSN.  Since he didn’t know that the number was fake and belonged to another person, the US Supreme Court ruled that he also didn’t break any federal ID theft laws since he did not ‘knowingly’ use another person’s number.  He just ‘borrowed’ it.  He could have just written 9 random numbers that may or may not have been tied to someone’s identity or he could have bought it from a broker, not knowing it was either fake or stolen.

These decisions contradicted previous rulings in Missouri, California, the Midwest, the Southeast and many other regions.  It also left folks scratching their heads wondering just what were the courts thinking.  Their logic is that, ‘(The suspect) claimed that the government could not prove that he knew that the numbers on the counterfeit documents were numbers assigned to other people….The question is whether the statute requires the government to show that the defendant knew that the ‘means of identification’ he or she unlawfully transferred, possessed, or used, in fact, belonged to ‘another person.’ We conclude that it does.’  I understand that there is a fine legal line between malicious intent and an uninformed accident but if you make up a number or obtain it by improper means, it’s still fake, false and fraudulent.  I also understand that there are criminal organizations that prey on immigrants who might not fully understand the ramifications and are told that it is legitimate.  We’ve all, at some point, been lured, duped or convinced that something we were obtaining was the real thing.  We’re told with great conviction that it is authentic and because we want to believe, we do.  When the truth is exposed, the ‘I didn’t know’ defense is obviously the most common and very well might be the honest answer.  Maybe because I focus on Information Security and a bit skeptical myself, I also gotta believe that there’s that little nudge, intuition or feeling in your belly telling you that something isn’t right.  I know because I’ve ignored that gut-check and got burned.  Just because something is ‘not-illegal’ does not make it the right thing to do. 

I’m not claiming to be a Mr. Goody-Two-Shoes and have certainly made my fair share of mistakes along with doing things I know to be wrong, legal or not.  I also know that always acting in the ‘proper’ way or doing the ‘right’ thing is difficult sometimes.  That’s what makes us human.  We might seek the easiest, least complicated and sometimes slightly unethical way of accomplishing something.  Sometimes we have to break the law to ensure the safety of others – like speeding to the Emergency Room if your wife is giving birth or a person is bleeding to death – but those are extenuating circumstances and doesn’t necessarily cause harm to others; unless, of course, you run somebody over on the way to the hospital.  There are victims with this SSN borrowing since the real person may not ever know that their information was used since it won’t show up on a credit report.  The trouble starts when a loan or tax payment is missed and by then, it’s too late.  The courts have had difficulty over the years trying to interpret certain laws as technology whizzes by but, at least in the States, our Social Security Number is one of our unique, primary identifiers and should be protected.  Incidentally, BIG-IP ASM does have a cool feature called Data Guard that can mask sensitive data from being leaked from the web application.  Data Guard helps protect against information leakage like the leakage of credit card or Social Security numbers.  Instead of sending the actual data to the client, ASM can respond by replacing the sensitive data with asterisks, or block the response and sending out an alert.  You can also decide what ASM should consider as sensitive: credit card numbers, Social Security numbers, or responses that contain a specific pattern.

ps

Related:

• Courts: Using another's SSN not a crime
• Colorado Supreme Court: Stolen SSN is not ID Theft
• Unsettling Ruling; Colorado Supreme Court says using stolen SSN not identity theft
• Personal Data For Sale – In time for the Holidays!
• Cybercrime, the Easy Way

twitter: @psilvas

Technorati Tags: F5, infrastructure 2.0, integration, cloud connect, Pete Silva, security, business, education, technology, application delivery, intercloud, cloud, context-aware, infrastructure 2.0, automation, web, internet, cybercrime, security, holiday shopping, identity theft, scam, email, data breach