Blackberry & GPS Legality

Unfortunately my employer provided Motorola cell phone will be replaced with a Blackberry to "save time" for HQ, but at our own extra expenditure of time. IMHO to BB is a poor substitute for a real cell phone.

I've been told the BB will have a GPS function enabled. We are required to be within contact 24/7/365 by pager or cell. I don't know how much of the info is true but I may want to lose the BB and carry my pager instead, after normal work hours.

I've also been told there's no way to import the 100 names & #s from cell to BB, which I find hard to swallow as fact.

Anybody really know? Thank you.

24x7x52? Heh - large parts of the country you can't travel to, or basements you can't go, huh? And if my company wanted to TRACK me, on MY time, they would have to pay a bleep of a lot more than they do now. I have a company blackberry - and don't really like it

I don't see anything illegal about any of this. They are providing the device, you are accepting it and the 24/365 on call appears to be part of your conditions of employment.....


I was just reminded about the enforcability of the 24/7 on call. In some states the law stipulates that you have X number of minutes of break time where you are NOT working. Folks have successfully argued that they are not truely on break if they have to respond to phone call and pagers.

Of course, winning that argument is not usually a good career move, and my have an impact come time for salary increases......

Daniel

Just did a google on this topic and found this company which provides mobile workforce management software which works on Blackberry with GPS.. I have no idea on the legality of your company tracking your whereabouts after working hours, but you might want to check your contract..

I don't know about the cellular system you're using, but if it is GSM (800mhz, 900mhz, 1800mhz, 1900mhz) which uses a small SIM card (smartcard), you can copy the phone numbers to the SIM card, which will be moved to your new Blackberry without losing any information.

I have a traditional styled BlackBerry for work. Our salesman traded his in for the more phone looking version. He uses the phone function mostly where I use almost exclusively the push email. The traditional thumboard unit makes a mediocre phone unless you use a headset (wired no bluetooth alas) IMO.

The ability to store contacts to the sim card is not as simple as it was on the old Ericsson I had. I think you have to import each contact to the sim card one at a time. That can be a PITA. It did have a PC link so I could store the data to the computer but to get it into another phone might be a problem. I haven't looked at that part of it for several months now so there could be something I missed.

My motorola v551 will allow me to copy all contents to the phone or sim card in one batch. So I believe that part is simply dependant on how the phone is programed.

gadget_lover said:

I don't see anything illegal about any of this. They are providing the device, you are accepting it and the 24/365 on call appears to be part of your conditions of employment.....

Click to expand...

Yeah - nothing illegal - but a royal PITA - and the GPS tracking is the part that would bug me the most

gadget_lover said:

I was just reminded about the enforcability of the 24/7 on call. In some states the law stipulates that you have X number of minutes of break time where you are NOT working. Folks have successfully argued that they are not truely on break if they have to respond to phone call and pagers.

Click to expand...

Wish my former employer bought that one! :laughing: On call "work time" only counted while on the phone, or responding to a placed call.

Thanks for your replies. I'm not certain how everything will pan out. My contract says nothing re GPS or tracking.

Thanks for the heads up about the phone style BB. I've heard various opinions on importing from the simm, even from "pros."

Happy NY!

Are you worried about big brother knowing where you are all the time? Somehow, I doubt that anyone at your company really cares enough to monitor everyone's location 24 hours per day. And GPS phones can only give a location if you are on a phone call. They cannot track you minute by minute. In fact, it would not surprise me if your company had no capability or interest whatsoever in getting a location on you. Most new cell phones these days have GPS capability for 911 use.

If the device is on, it's trackable. GPS or not.

moonrise said:

If the device is on, it's trackable. GPS or not.

Click to expand...

While technically true, that info is only available with fairly sophistictaed hardware. A simple directional radio reciever will find a transmitter, but not tell you which one.

I looked at blackberry's site, and find that they are pushing technology that will provide the GPS location of the blackberry on demand. They are pushing it as a way to track company assets, employees and vehicles.

Personally, I'd politely suggest that they provide a device without GPS for off hours use. If they refuse I'd quietly look for another job.

I've worked off hours support for the last 20 years. In several cases there was the expectation that I was AVAILABLE 24x7x365. In each case, it was agreed that it was unreasonable to expect one to forego drinking, out of town trips and other project s that require lots of time. The solution is to select one person at a time to be IT while the rest would pitch in if available.

Personally, I think it's a bad idea to work for salary in a business that includes being on call.

Daniel

My workplace has 24x7 on-call vendor support reps. I've always tried to call them as close to regular business hours as possible, but they get paid quite well and are willing to help you out whenever you need it. They don't stay on-call forever and cycle in and out of being "IT" every few months, or designate a replacement when they go on vacation, etc.

The company I used to work for had GPS-equipped Nextel phones for their field techs several years ago. They discovered an amazing amount of ... shall we say, timeclock fraud once they started using the software. Some techs would insist they were onsite for 8-12 hours at some remote location and the GPS history would show them miles away from the jobsite. I think they were able to determine the rough street address of another's field tech's mistress... the fool was terminated and divorced in short order.

The understanding with the "surviving" techs was that they were to have their phones on them during working hours and leave the GPS receiver on at all times. What they did when they weren't on the clock was their business. Most of them promptly switched off the GPS at the end of day, and we had countless better things to do than track them during off-hours. We had no qualms about using the GPS capabilities because some of our field techs were cheating the company to the tune of 20-40 hours per week, which lead to projects falling behind and cost the company money to the tune of late penalties, and lost business.

I was on call at a previous job. But we alternated weeks on and off with 4 other guys so I was on 1 week and 1 weekend a month. Not so bad. Since it was only over the phone off hours they didn't care where I was physically as long as I returned the page. Anything more than that and I would have started to look for a new job too.

if you're doing your job then it's no business of theirs where you stop for lunch or how long you spend in the bathroom.

now, if you're actually billing for onsite stuff or something, then thats different. It can actually work to your advantage to have your location on file somewhere for the same reason that police call in their every move to log it. So that when someone you interact with says you did something or were somewhere, you can prove that you were not and could not possibly have been involved.

but 24/7/365 is ludicrous. No job requires that that will ever keep anybody.