Work Advice: Smartphones and the slipperly slope of lost privacy

Q: I am a federal employee. Our agency is deploying smartphones to replace our BlackBerry devices. The new phones have a GPS feature that cannot be disabled. HR says the agency wants to be able to find the phone if it is lost, but that will only work if the phone is turned on. We are told that we will not be tracked in our off-hours.

As a professional, I want to have a link to my email in off-hours, but I do not think it is the agency's business where I am. Do we have any recourse if our location data are used in some way against us? Do we have a right to know what they are doing with this information?

A: The convenience of an employer-issued mobile phone (or laptop or car) comes at a price: Your employer generally has a right to know where its property is and how it's being used. This doesn't mean you have no reasonable right to privacy, but there's no fixed legal border yet between your employer's right to protect its business interests and your rights as a private citizen.

To get a sense of where that border lies, ask for a written copy of your agency's smartphone policy, specifically how it applies its "no off-hours tracking" rule: Does it actually disable your GPS outside normal business hours, whatever those are? Or does it leave the GPS running but treat location data collected off the clock as off-limits for disciplinary purposes?

In some lawsuits against private-sector employers that tracked employees' off-hours activities via GPS, federal and state courts have indicated that employers' tracking should be reasonable in scope and based on legitimate work-related grounds, according to Elaine Fitch of Kalijarvi, Chuzi, Newman & Fitch. You may be able to file a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission or Merit Systems Protection Board, but only after your employer has taken some action against you based on the off-hours data it has gathered, Fitch says.

So what if you preemptively want to know what data your employer is collecting through your pocket snitch? Fitch suggests you contact your agency's Privacy Officer and make a request through the Freedom of Information Act. Just don't expect quick results -- or any results, if your agency can cite a national security or law enforcement reason for denying your request.

In the meantime, know that your tether leaves a trail, and act accordingly. You may decide to trust your employer's policy, or the dense volume of data being collected, to shield you from being singled out for tracking. Or you can decide paranoia is the better part of prudence, and leave your phone switched off unless you're actively checking work messages from a "safe" location. Safest of all is keeping all personal and work-related communications quarantined by using separate phones. As with most technology, balancing convenience and security is a delicate act.

• Miller has written for and edited tax publications for 16 years, most recently for the accounting firm KPMG's Washington National Tax office. You can find her on Twitter, @KarlaAtWork.