Your corporate secrets are worthless

Your corporate secrets are worthless

Paranoid about corporate espionage? On edge about your company’s creative edge? Worried about the impending BlackBerry restriction? Relax, says Sam Potter – you don’t even have any secrets.

August 1, 2010 1:36 by Samuel Potter

Before the now infamous launch of the iPhone 4 (marred by technical faults and bad press), Apple had another mini-crisis. You probably remember it. Somebody within the company managed to “lose” a prototype of the device. A software engineer out celebrating his birthday left the iPhone 4 (disguised as an iPhone 3) in a bar, and it soon found itself in the hands of a prominent tech blog.

Steve Jobs and his company were infuriated, and Jobs himself reportedly called Gawker to demand the phone’s return. Meanwhile all the legal moves at Apple’s disposal were used, from letters to a house search. The company tried everything it could to recover the device and protect its valuable technological advances.

I can understand their anger at losing the device, but I cannot understand their behavior subsequently. According to reports, the company used its influence to bring about the house search, to the fury of many in the tech and journalism communities. It was not very clever PR, but it was all to protect those precious technological advances.

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Tags: blackberry ban, blackberry encryption, blackberry suspension, blackberry uae, blackpad, business secrets, company secrets, corporate secrets, iPad, ipad copies, iphone 4, iphone 4 copies, iphone 4 leak, iphone 4 stolen, RIM, rim tablet

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2 Comments

Andrew on August 2, 2010 7:03 am

Privacy for information that is potentially, particularly legally, sensitive is certainly different to technological secrecy.

RIM’s encryption is for their customers, not themselves.
Moamer on August 2, 2010 9:35 am

This article misses the reason why UAE is clamping down on BB. It has nothing to do with keeping or losing innovative corporate secrets, but it has to do with being able to tap into any line at any time to have, voice, data, and text content access to all communications. IN an era of assassinations on home turf such as AlMabhouh, the concern is who is coming in signaling who and doing what, rather than what kind of brilliant new idea does xyz corp have.