Worker fired for disabling GPS app that tracked her 24 hours a day [Updated]
“This intrusion would be highly offensive to a reasonable person,” lawsuit says.
May 11, 2015
by David Kravets
(This story has been updated with comments from the plaintiff’s attorney.)
A Central California woman claims she was fired after uninstalling an app that her employer required her to run constantly on her company issued iPhone?an app that tracked her every move 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Plaintiff Myrna Arias, a former Bakersfield sales executive for money transfer service Intermex, claims in a state court lawsuit that her boss, John Stubits, fired her shortly after she uninstalled the job-management Xora app that she and her colleagues were required to use. According to her suit (PDF) in Kern County Superior Court:
After researching the app and speaking with a trainer from Xora, Plaintiff and her co-workers asked whether Intermex would be monitoring their movements while off duty. Stubits admitted that employees would be monitored while off duty and bragged that he knew how fast she was driving at specific moments ever since she installed the app on her phone. Plaintiff expressed that she had no problem with the app’s GPS function during work hours, but she objected to the monitoring of her location during non-work hours and complained to Stubits that this was an invasion of her privacy. She likened the app to a prisoner’s ankle bracelet and informed Stubits that his actions were illegal. Stubits replied that she should tolerate the illegal intrusion?..
Intermex did not immediately respond for comment.
The suit, which claims invasion of privacy, retaliation, unfair business practices, and other allegations, seeks damages in excess of $500,000 and asserts she was monitored on the weekends when she was not working.
Arias’ boss “scolded” her for uninstalling the app shortly after being required to use it, according to the suit. Her attorneys said the woman made $7,250 per month and that she “met all quotas” during a brief stint with Intermex last year.
“This intrusion would be highly offensive to a reasonable person,” the filing said.
Arias’ attorney, Gail Glick, said in a Monday e-mail to Ars that the app allowed her client’s “bosses to see every move the employees made throughout the day.”
The app had a “clock in/out” feature which did not stop GPS monitoring, that function remained on. This is the problem about which Ms. Arias complained. Management never made mention of mileage. They would tell her co-workers and her of their driving speed, roads taken, and time spent at customer locations. Her manager made it clear that he was using the program to continuously monitor her, during company as well as personal time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hRQ5O4koNM
Hacking group may be NSA in disguise
03/11/15
By Elise Viebeck
New evidence uncovered by security researchers suggests that a dangerous hacking collective is actually the National Security Agency.
The so-called Equation Group, a set of hackers responsible for at least 500 malware infections in 42 countries, is considered one of history?s most effective cyber espionage rings.
Now, the Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab is pointing to new signs that the group is actually made up of NSA personnel.
In a report published Wednesday, Kaspersky researchers revealed that the term ?BACKSNARF? was found inside the code of the Equation Group?s online platform. The same term was used by the NSA as the name of a project by its cyber warfare unit.
In addition to that coincidence, analysis of the Equation Group?s working hours suggests it operates as a regular software development team, likely located on the East Coast of the United States. Members of the group work overwhelmingly during regular business hours from Monday through Friday and almost never on Saturday or Sunday.
The Equation Group had already been suspected of ties to the NSA, though Kaspersky researchers still stop short of alleging a direct connection.
The hacking collective is considered to be the work of a nation-state, given the vast resources required to support its highly sophisticated activities.
Equation Group attacks have also focused almost exclusively on adversaries of the United States, including Iran and Russia.
Judge: Give NSA unlimited access to digital data
Dec 4, 2014
By Grant Gross
The U.S. National Security Agency should have an unlimited ability to collect digital information in the name of protecting the country against terrorism and other threats, an influential federal judge said during a debate on privacy.
“I think privacy is actually overvalued,” Judge Richard Posner, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, said during a conference about privacy and cybercrime in Washington, D.C., Thursday.
“Much of what passes for the name of privacy is really just trying to conceal the disreputable parts of your conduct,” Posner added. “Privacy is mainly about trying to improve your social and business opportunities by concealing the sorts of bad activities that would cause other people not to want to deal with you.”
Congress should limit the NSA?s use of the data it collects-for example, not giving information about minor crimes to law enforcement agencies-but it shouldn?t limit what information the NSA sweeps up and searches, Posner said. “If the NSA wants to vacuum all the trillions of bits of information that are crawling through the electronic worldwide networks, I think that?s fine,” he said.
In the name of national security, U.S. lawmakers should give the NSA “carte blanche,” Posner added. “Privacy interests should really have very little weight when you?re talking about national security,” he said. “The world is in an extremely turbulent state-very dangerous.”
Posner criticized mobile OS companies for enabling end-to-end encryption in their newest software. “I?m shocked at the thought that a company would be permitted to manufacture an electronic product that the government would not be able to search,” he said.
Other speakers at Thursday?s event, including Judge Margaret McKeown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, disagreed with Posner, saying legal limits on government surveillance are necessary. With much of U.S. privacy law based on a reasonable expectation of privacy, it?s difficult, however, to define what that means when people are voluntarily sharing all kinds of personal information online, she said.
An expectation of privacy is a foundational part of democracies, said Michael Dreeben, deputy solicitor general in the U.S. Department of Justice. Although Dreeben has argued in favor of law enforcement surveillance techniques in a handful of cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, he argued courts should take an active role in protecting personal privacy.
“A certain degree of privacy is perhaps a precondition for freedom, political freedom, artistic freedom, personal autonomy,” he said. “It?s kind of baked into the nature of the democratic system.”
David Cole, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, called for a change in the U.S. law that gives email stored for six months less legal protection than newer messages. The ability of law enforcement agencies to gain access to stored email without a warrant makes no sense when many email users never delete messages.
U.S. courts or Congress also need to reexamine current law that allows law enforcement agencies to gain access, without a warrant, to digital information shared with a third party, given the amount of digital information people share with online services, he said.
Some recent court cases, including the Supreme Court?s 2014 Riley v. California ruling limiting law enforcement searches of mobile phones, have moved privacy law in the right direction, he said.
Posner questioned why smartphone users need legal protections, saying he doesn?t understand what information on smartphones should be shielded from government searches. “If someone drained my cell phone, they would find a picture of my cat, some phone numbers, some email addresses, some email text,” he said. “What?s the big deal?
“Other people must have really exciting stuff,” Posner added. “Do they narrate their adulteries, or something like that?”
Smartphones can contain all kinds of information that people don?t want to share, including medical information, visits to abortion doctors and schedules for Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, Cole said. “Your original question, ?what?s the value of privacy unless you?ve got something to hide?? that?s a very short-sighted way of thinking about the value of privacy,” he said.
In the 1960s and ?70s, government agencies investigated political figures, in some cases, bugging hotel rooms in search of evidence of affairs, Cole noted. Government misuse of surveillance information is still a risk, he said, and smartphones could be a treasure trove of information.
The U.S. and other governments have a long history of targeting people “who they are concerned about because they have political views and political positions that the government doesn?t approve of,” Cole said.
