Dark Side of IP comes from the deep

IP PBXes have made life a lot easier for the phone guy and the IT guy. More accurately, the IT guy is going to pick up the job of the phone guy since proprietary PBX systems are being replaced by rack-mountable solutions that handle phone calls as SIP.

Since SIP underlies everything from Vonage to the freeware Asterisk solution, it's not surprising that there are gobs and gobs of solutions coming out onto the market to record IP PBX phone calls at the corporate/business level.

Some dolts confuse these solutions with national governments mandates for telecommunications carriers to provide "lawful intercept" capability - that is, wiretapping by the police and other agencies. Let me be perfectly clear: We're not talking about the ability for one's government to play big brother with your phone calls, we're talking about your workplace playing Big Brother.

In some industries, such as in the financial and health care industries, as well as in various call centres around the globe, it is an accepted and expected practice to record the telephone conversation. If you've ever heard the phrase "Your call may be monitored ...," it's likely that the call is being recorded and under most US state laws, the warning is sufficient.

Even if you aren't in a heavily-regulated industry in the States, the employer has the right to monitor phone calls at any time (as well as read your company e-mail, IMs and anything else you do on company time with company resources). IP PBXes make recording and monitoring simple. Just drop in the 1U box with the disk drives next to the Asterisk box, pluck off the SIP data streams, write the cloned streams to the hard drive.

Conceivably, the company could hold onto phone calls forever, so long as they're willing to pay for the disk space and/or archive off old phone calls onto storage media - something you may wish to consider the next time you start talking dirty to the lover with the door to your office closed. And with the falling cost of disk space, buying more storage space is noise when compared to the price of coffee service or the monthly copier bill.

The next wave of enhancement technology will move from simple recording to computer monitoring. Call centres already run recorded calls though sophisticated (and expensive) speech-to-text engines, then take the resulting text and index the heck out of it so managers can sift calls for key words and phrases. FedEx monitors all contact center calls for "Wow," taking a good call and using it as example to their customer service employees on how to best serve frustrated customers. More sophisticated queries are being used by firms to spot competitors trying to poach customers; after all the customer has to call up to cancel service, so if a number of customers said they got a "great offer" as they are leaving, that information can be sifted out of the voice streams and shipped down to the marketing department to adjust this month's bargains.

At the same time, computer analysis also means that a control-freak boss can pick up inbound phone calls made by recruiters trying to hire away staff or look for disgruntled employees grumbling about him "behind his back."

So, what have you said about your boss lately on the company phone?