Yes, of course. I just think it's the employer's problem in this case, not the employee's.

I think it's the employees. You know, because it's their phone and in their interest to keep it separate. Did they ask their phone vendor for a phone which could keep the data separate? Did they read the user manual? Did they vote with their feet or dollars? Did they give a damn at all?

> Do you agree that the distinction between personal and company is vague and human defined?

No. The argument made by many people disagreeing with me in this discussion is predicated on the employee downloading data from the company Exchange system. That provides an objective standard for what constitutes "company data".

But if I sync my contacts with a company Exchange server, I cannot add contacts without them being stored on the Exchange server. If I add a personal contact, those details are sent to the company. Is this now personal or company data? How is the Exchange server to know that you don't want contact X deleted? And why should it listen to you if that would just be a way around it's security?

If I open an email with a picture and save it, it goes into the camera roll as a copy. Is that now a personal copy or a company file?

If I get a company email with a link to the corporate intranet and I login, is the cached data in Safari which has corporate data in it but which did not come from the Exchange server, is that company or personal?

If you're going to try to broaden that in some ill-defined way to any other data the employee has, you might as well argue that any employer should have the right to audit any and all of an employee's personal property, communications or brainwaves.

No, that would be stupid.

As I keep saying, if the company requires that kind of control, it should be issuing employees with dedicated systems at company expense, configured appropriately

No it shouldn't. If the company requires work from home it should issue dedicated systems at company expense. If it merely requires control over whatever system you use then it should only provide advice and understanding when you agree to that control.

Just because a company requires control should you wish to access things remotely does not mean that they are obliged to provide the device. Only if they require you to use a device should they provide one. If they do not require it but you choose to provide one, they should be allowed to require restrictions and refuse if you do not agree.

The interesting bit is that these restrictions are

a) not intuitive to a nontechnical person

b) obvious to anyone who knows about them.

I struggle to see any circumstances under which installing software on an employee's personal property that gives the employer the ability to wipe the entire machine arbitrarily would ever be justified.

When that personal property has no other support for erasing important data apart from wiping the entire machine, yet the company mandates that devices be able to erase company data.

What else do you want? You keep switching between:

- Some perfect device which does not exist

- The scenario in the newsitem, where nothing bad happened except the person was shocked and annoyed

- Some hypothetical scenario where extreme damage was done to the person

What are you really arguing? That it's unfair? That it's less than ideal? That the company is horrible? That Microsoft is horrible?

What's your point?

iPhones and other activesync devices cannot but wipe everything or nothing, and companies do demand the ability to wipe data.

Some companies may demand employees buy personal devices for work use, that's unpleasant and possibly illegal. Many do not.

Those that do not often give people the option to use approved personal devices if they prefer them to work provided ones.

If people choose to do that without understanding what they are doing, that is unfortunate. In an ideal world it wouldn't happen, but it does actually happen.

The best thing to do is:

a) Have backups of your important stuff

b) Have a mindset where you can accept things goind weirdly in systems you don't understand.

c) Have a mindset that you accept the more technical and complex the systems involved in your life are, the more this sort of thing is going to happen.