Lex Nokia: Monitor Employee Emails for Leaks

Nokia has submitted a proposed law in Finland allowing them to be able to legally monitor incoming and outgoing emails of their employees in order to determine who are leaking trade secrets. The proposed bill is dubbed Lex Nokia.

It’s been a common practice by some Nokia employees to leak out details and photos of products yet to be released/announced. Nokia believes the product leaks put a negative impact on all the efforts made by the Finnish company.

nokia finland office

In a blog post at the Nokia Conversations website, the Finland-based company admitted that the Nokia E71 is their most leaked product ever.

It adds that these breaches of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) that specifically state that pre-launch information is property of Nokia and cannot be revealed outside the company. The proposed bill (Lex Nokia) would evidently help curb that problem.

It is said that the mobile giant is threatening to leave Finland if the bill is not passed, leaving some 16,000 employees and over 1.3 billion euros in annual tax revenues. Nokia representatives deny this in a recent interview posted at Yahoo! News.

{translated from IDG Sweden}

Abe Olandres

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines. He is also a technology consultant, a tech columnist with several national publications, resource speaker and mentor/advisor to several start-up companies.

https://www.yugatech.com

7 Comments

Snow says:

16 years ago

Hmmm, interesting news.

Well, I hope Nokia considers the Philippines if ever they want to pull out in Finland. :)
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Jhay says:

16 years ago

It’s a serious blow to employees’ privacy rights. Besides, if their company email starts to get monitored closely, they’ll just use other methods like flash drives, even their own Nokia phones to leak information.
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Maurice B. says:

16 years ago

yeah and if they’ll chose Philippines I hope by that time we as Filipinos would mature and understand the value of “IPR’s” or intellectual property rights.

if lex nokia will become a law… i’ll say goodbye to leaks from GSMarena.com
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Jonathan says:

16 years ago

Both Nokia and the Finnish Government has denied these speculations about the claims of the said local newspaper.

I think they’re just bringing and recycling back the old news to sell more newspapers around the country. Nice try though =)
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Mr.J says:

16 years ago

Once you have worked for Nokia; you don’t wanna do the same mistake ever again.
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jpeb says:

16 years ago

i don’t know much about Finnish laws and jurisprudence but Nokia can just ask all its employees to sign a waiver of their rights on corporate email privacy. companies in the USA and the Phils. do this.
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mela says:

16 years ago

i agree with jay, this is in part also a violation of an employee’s privacy.
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