Synchronised smart phones: The collision of personal privacy and organisational data security

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore the organisational and individual motivations for incorporating personallyowned smart phones into the workplace and challenges arising from use; privacy and data security concerns of involved parties in the organisation. This study uses exploratory case study method and investigates privacy and security regarding personally-owned smart-phone usage in workplace. The study found that convenience, ease of use and access to emails were motives behind employees' use of personal smart phones in the workplace. Further, employees have higher privacy expectation. Sample for this study was small to provide statistically meaningful results, Further research is needed to cover a larger case study spanning multiple organisations in other sectors. Mobile devices are creating challenges to organisational data security and employees' right to information privacy. This study suggests that organisations need to reconsider data security and employees' privacy policies to address possible conflict between data security and employees' privacy.

The usage and adoption of cloud computing by small and medium businesses

“…But, at the same time, it is enhancing the convenience of accessing the office emails on their own devices, rather than using the officially provided cumbersome laptops. This increases the performance of the employees (Chigona, Robertson, & Mimbi, 2012).…”

Understanding employees' adoption of the Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD): the roles of information security-related conflict and fatigue

“…Second, a conflict may arise between the organizational goal of security and personal privacy concerns (Chigona et al, 2012;Garba et al, 2015aGarba et al, , 2015b. Mobile devices contain a wealth of data that users might deem private.…”

“…More and more scholars have noticed the conflicts perceived by employees regarding the adoption of BYOD, of which, the most prominent is the conflict between usability and security (Vorakulpipat et al, 2017). For example, employees may worry about potential privacy breaches when dealing with both work and private data on personal devices at work (Chigona, et al, 2012;Garba et al, 2015aGarba et al, , 2015b. In other cases, employees may find it difficult to reconcile personal use habits and organizational security demands (Chen, et al, 2013;Musarurwa, et al, 2019), work-life conflict (Askar and Shen, 2016;Chang et al, 2014;Qi et al, 2017), and so on.…”