I used to work for a telemarketing company, which also has a huge presence as a TV shopping network.
As a project manager, I was responsible to assembling telemarketing lists and making them available to the telemarketers as printed lists. The company paid for each source which came in as a set of leads which we would then call to attempt to make sales to.
The printed lists went to each telemarketer on the sales floor.
However, I witnessed how some of the telemarketers were taking some of those lists with them. I wondered why and I soon found out when I discovered that, they were also working for the competition in the evening hours, and using my company's list as leads. Needless to say, those employees were getting paid for those leads by the competition and were also reaping further rewards when they made sales to the customers on the list.
That was semi-technical data theft, and business spying at the same time, where the competition was using my company's lists to keep abreast of what we were doing while stealing our customers.
When I mentioned the matter to the floor managers, they didn't seem concerned at all, and I later figured out, shortly before I left the company, that those managers were also doing the same kind of theft, and were also working for the competition as managers there too.
Needless to say, with personal smartphones and tablets and other computing gadgets being allowed into the enterprise, data theft and business spying is being made infinitely simpler and a lot more fruitful.
BYOD is an easy tool for data theft and easy for the competition to keep up with you company or to help destroy it.
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