Yet another tracking software, this time for your BlackBerry. I don’t have one, so don’t know how it may affect my life, but I can imagine… Yahoo! News reports on Security Software Tracks BlackBerry Communications
Gwava, the developer of security software, plans to introduce today a product that lets enterprises easily track and find text messages and phone calls that BlackBerry users send and receive.
The software should appeal to enterprises that need to comply with regulations that require them to track employee communications. Key to the Retain for BlackBerry Enterprise Server is that it doesn’t require any client software. That means an IT administrator can manage it fully from the back end.
The BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), which companies use to let workers send and receive corporate e-mail on their BlackBerry devices, already logs data about SMS (Short Message Service) text messages and e-mails sent and received. However, users must view the data in a giant Excel spreadsheet where each row is one transaction, said Mitch Lauer, director of business development for Gwava. “It’s extremely difficult to utilize,” he said.
“Our software goes into the BES and makes sense of all these logs,” he said. Retain shifts the data to a SQL database. IT administrators can then manipulate the data using a viewer that can be accessed on multiple workstations.
On the viewer, an administrator sees a list of BlackBerry users and can view their history of e-mails, text messages and phone calls. The list of e-mail and text messages includes the actual messages as well as who sent and received them. The phone call list includes the phone number of the person who called or was called and the length of the call.
Enterprises using BlackBerry phones can already easily audit e-mail messages because they run through a separate e-mail server, such as Microsoft Exchange. But tracking text messages is harder, and Retain lets administrators see e-mail, text messages and voice logs in a single view.
The software also tracks Pin messages, which are text messages that BlackBerry users can send to each other in a slightly different way than text messages offered by mobile operators.
IT administrators can also view data such as the top ten users of phone calls in chart form. To further analyze or investigate an issue, an administrator can also export the information into Excel.
I have written on several examples of tracking in our everyday activities on the Internet (from Amazon, Google, online games) in my book chapter1. This report is just one more example.
We are certainly getting “there”: an e-environment under constant surveillance. You are being tracked, like it or not.
1 Loh, C. S. (Jan 2007). Designing Online Games Assessment as Information Trails. In D. Gibson, C. Aldrich & M. Prensky (Eds.), Games and Simulation in Online Learning: Research and Development Frameworks (pp. 323-348). Hershey, PA: Idea Group, Inc. [More information and PDF]