RIM Selling Out Corporate Customers’ Privacy (Again)

Government man of a foreign a nation who would like to have the same unfettered access to all Blackberry communication in your country? Just ask RIM, ending your request with “or else” and you shall receive.

Seems letting the UAE and Saudis spy on BES Blackberry traffic at will struck RIM as having more positive results than negative as they are doing it again, this time with the Indian government, drafting a proposal saying essentially Okay, you guys win, we’ll set you up with some servers to monitor our customers real quick like we did with the Saudis and whoever else, which in their defense they had to do or face, unless these governments had been bluffing, very big banhammers.

Forgive me for bringing up Google again but when they took a stand and stood it out with China (and in the end managed to leverage the Chinese into letting Google.cn funnel traffic to the unfiltered google.com.hk) that made me and my old man want to buy a few more shares on principle. Conversely, I just got off the phone with my broker frustrated that apparently you can’t short a stock (RIM) in a retirement account.

I suppose I just live in an imaginary world in which not bending straight over to such demands can, in the long run, be good for your customers and even good for business. On the bright side, without RIM’s security anymore, those pesky terrorists who actually own a BES will never be able to come up with another way to exchange GPS coordinates or whatever privately.

Doug Simmons