RIM: We record "everything" [updated]

Kind of creepy news trickling out of Research in Motion, the company that makes the phenomenally successful Blackberry. In an interview with ZDNet, the company's CIO, Robin Bienfait, said that RIM records, well, pretty much everything you do within its walls, including your personal phone calls.

Specifically, "all actions carried out on RIM's internal network" are logged, which means emails, web browsing, and phone calls, all recorded for posterity. "I record everything," said Bienfait, putting it bluntly.

Many office workers are accustomed to IT oversight of their computer habits -- email is backed up for legal and data security purposes (though it's rarely ever read) and many companies restrict employees from visiting certain websites -- not just gambling/gaming/porn but also career and sometimes even "gossip" sites. But recording every phone call? Even for die-hard "employer rights" advocates, that's a tough one to swallow.

Naturally Bienfait is concerned about leaks, as the company, like most of the current-era tech world, jealously guards the details about its upcoming product line. Should word get out about what RIM is working on, untold amounts of damage could be rained down on the company. Why, just imagine how many people would be knocking off the BlackBerry Storm and its mega-button design had they gotten wind of it in advance...

For the most part, employees seem to accept the Big Brother treatment, but things get dicey when employees have to deal with personal issues on work time -- say, a divorce proceeding or medical conversations -- things which they'd probably rather not have recorded permanently by Bienfait's crew. Her advice: Bring in a cell phone and take the call there instead.

Just don't do it on your corporate BlackBerry. Those are of course monitored too.

UPDATE: A RIM spokesperson responds that the linked ZDNet story is "inaccurate." Her unedited comments follow.

I wanted to follow up with you regarding your recent story about RIM which suggests RIM records all employee calls. This story is inaccurate and I must therefore ask you to update the story. RIM does not record employee phone calls. Robin Bienfait's comments, which originally appeared in ZDNet Australia, were intended to describe a capability that exists with RIM's BlackBerry MVS technology. This technology allows companies to record both voice and data based conversations, which is particularly useful for RIM's customers in regulated industries that require such ability, but Ms. Bienfait did not intend to suggest that RIM itself records employee phone calls.

RIM has deployed an internal beta test of its latest MVS technology to a subset of employees and Ms. Bienfait intended to convey that RIM was recording data that is transmitted over voice channels (ie. SMS
messages) as well as data channels (ie. email messages and IM chat sessions), but RIM is not recording the phone calls of the employees involved in the beta test or any other employees.

The quotes in the original ZDNet story seem awfully clear and incontrovertible to me ("I record everything."), so one has to wonder where the breakdown in communication occured...