Bring your own

A BBC article about people being encouraged to bring their own computers to work, in an effort to reduce IT budgets.  It's interesting to see how in this case the operation of market forces is pushing in the direction of a more transparent society.

Obviously, if more workers are using their own hardware there's a much greater chance of data either being leaked or (more likely) sold to rival companies or stock market gamblers, and it would be possible to do this in a somewhat anonymous way similar to the way that Wikileaks operates.  No matter how much technical security is in place, if data is capable of being displayed on the screen then it's capable of being scraped and OCR'd if there is a sufficient incentive to do so, using software tools which are cheap and easily available.  If workers have remote desktop software installed then it's possible that even the task of screen scraping and recovering text could itself be outsourced and centralised.

Of course doing the above would be pretty unethical, but experience suggests that if there is money to be made from selling data then there will always be a proportion of individuals who are prepared to disregard any ethical considerations, especially if their wages are already very low and they don't particularly care about the company which they're working for.