MobileIron Reports Trust Gap between Employers, Employees in the BYOD World

 As Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) becomes standard business practice, employees and employers are suffering an ever growing disconnect between what is, and is not, private information on mobile devices. The MobileIron Trust Gap Survey has found that 84 percent of respondents own the smartphones they use for work purposes, along with 82 percent of tablet users. Regarding privacy, 41 percent of respondents were sure their employers had no access to information on their device and 15 percent were unsure. Just 28 percent think their company can monitor their work email and 22 percent think that their work contacts are available to their employers.

In reality, employers have access to work email and attachments from any mobile device used to receive corporate emails. Additionally, respondents were most concerned about their employers accessing personal communications and text messages, but an employee’s physical location was noted as a concern by less than half of workers. Age was found to be the most telling size indicator of the Trust Gap, with people aged 18 to 34 being much less comfortable with employers accessing data on their devices compared to workers over 55.

By and large, employees reported a need for clearer communications from their employer in order to shrink the trust gap. Indeed, 26 percent said the most important thing to be done about the gap was for their employer to explain the purpose behind mobile-data access and how personal content was separated from work content. Another 20 percent said written permission for data access would raise trust. Written notification of what an employer can and can’t see was preferred by 18 percent of respondents while another 18 percent wanted a written promise to only look at company information. The final 15 percent wanted a written request for access to any data not work related.

Information that employers actually have access to include: carrier and country; make, model, and OS version; device identifier; phone number; list of installed apps; location of device; battery level; corporate emails and attachments; and corporate contacts. Information that employers cannot see includes: information in apps; personal email and attachments; texts; photos; videos; browsing activity; and voicemails.