With a remote workforce and everyone working digitally, the threat landscape increases. A team of my research group, led by PhD candidate Borke Obada-Obieh, performed the first qualitative study on employee security and privacy concerns when telecommuting.
We identified the perceived outcomes of threats associated with the participants’ concerns. We grouped our findings into four categories of challenges and threats: technological, human, organizational, and environmental. We also discovered concerns that need to be addressed to protect employee privacy while telecommuting. Many employees felt that they had to sacrifice some privacy to get their work done, such as revealing their personal phone number or street address to clients. Participants feared that clients could locate their home or that they could suffer a break-in by thieves. Therefore, there is a need for discussion of how employees and organizations can protect their privacy and security while telecommuting. Our contributions provide insights into the security and privacy gaps that exist with regard to employees telecommuting.
Watch Borke’s presentation of the paper at USENIX SOUPS, flagship academic symposium on usable privacy and security, or read the entire paper for more details.
Obada-Obieh, Borke, Yue Huang, and Konstantin Beznosov. “Challenges and Threats of Mass Telecommuting: A Qualitative Study of Workers.” In Seventeenth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2021), pp. 675-694. 2021.
