I got an offer from my job to get me an iphone for various uses on the job. They told me that my options are to either use it for work only, and they’ll pay for it, or I can use it for work/personal and I’ll have to cover half the bill.
I’m wondering how they’d know whether the use would be work-related or not. Now typically you can get a list of calls your cell phone has made using detailed billing or probably through your account on the website. That’s fine, I don’t need it for calls much. But what about for data? Could they know when I was using it for data, and what for? Is there any sort of monitoring?
The bill from AT&T will show how much data was used over their network. if you use it only over Wi-Fi there would be no record unless the business has logging software on the iPhone
From the AT&T website of the account owner they will be able to tell time, date and amount of data used of/in your data sessions, but not anything specific. They can’t tell if you go to Google a hundred times a day (for your SDMB citations of course) or if you’re “making the rounds” of various sex sites (presumably also for SD citations).
Cell phone bills do not usually show browsing info other than the amount of data used. The concerns I would have with a work phone are:
1: The bill gives your employer a list of all your telephone numbers you dialed and all that dialed you. In a dispute if you had been using the phone to make lots of personal calls, or to dial whatever, your employer could easily find the people and places you were dialing.
2: If you have huge data usage from downloading files or playing games online your employer will be billed for that and will want to know what’s up with your usage volume. Big data usage is generally an indicator to most employers that you are screwing around instead of working.
3: Your employer owns the phone and can demand it back at any time. If they tell you to hand it over on short notice all your links and photos and media data on your phone is accessible to them.
4: While it is a legal and procedural PITA it is possible, with sufficient pretext by the employer, to have the phone ISP reveal the places you have been browsing. If these are not nice places there could be issues.
If you can keep the phone clean do it. If you like to ass around on your phone I would not take the chance.
At the expense of disagreeing with prior posts, if the employer is paying the bill they can get access to more info (if willing to go through the effort). They pay the bill, so they can monitor data. The cell company has to (in the US) maintain logs of all of your activity. They can get at it. It can be a pain to get to, but it can be done.
At my last job we had work supplied cell phones. They were ok with us using it for personal calls, data was unlimited so no problem there. I got a personal cell phone because while I wasn’t doing anything wrong, I wanted my private life to stay private.
EDIT: By default it won’t show up on the bill like that, but if they subscribe to detailed billing or go to their account on the AT&T website, it’ll be there laid out exactly like that.
Ah, well thanks for the info, I won’t try to do that then.
I’m having a hard time deciding what to do - I’m thinking of getting an ipad 3 with data, and there’s a rumor that sometime soonish verizon is going to come out with a shared data plan amongst several devices, so I’d definitely rather wait to see what happens with that before I commit to any plan. I’d hate to get an AT&T smartphone contract now then 2 months later find out that I could’ve had a smartphone/tablet combined plan from Verizon. Blah.
May not work if you make a lot of personal calls on the road, but I put Skype on my work iPhone, and pay $3/month for unlimited calls to US and Canada. This will use the data plan, but if you make most or all of your personal calls when near wi-fi, this won’t show up on the AT&T usage report. $3/month is hard to beat, price wise, if you only call people when near your home wireless.