Nokia, the Finnish, yet multi-national, mobile telecommunications giant, has had some issues with its employees leaking confidential information to competitors and other outsiders.
Finnish privacy laws have made it difficult for Nokia to gather evidence about such incidents.
So Nokia did what all great MegaCorps do and decided they needed the laws changed. In US, they would’ve just put a few dollars in an envelope to a few key politicians, but that doesn’t apparently work as well in Finland as threats do.
According to a rather comprehensive report about it by Helsingin Sanomat, a leading Finnish newspaper, Nokia threatened to leave Finland, if a new law allowing snooping of employees’ emails didn’t get done.
A draft for a new law, dubbed Lex Nokia, was quickly put together and it’s being decided upon by the Finnish Parliament in two week’s time. Let’s see how the public outcry over Nokia’s actions affect the debate about the new law.
By bending to the will of Nokia, our legislators have, yet again, shown a remarkable lack of independent will and spine. Do they really think Nokia would have followed through? Moving their entire operations abroad would be very costly. Not that they won’t eventually do it anyway. Finnish labor is expensive.
-TPP
