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Nokia denies idea of leaving Finland
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Nokia has denied threats that the company would leave its native Finland if laws in electronic data protection and surveillance were not changed, refuting a newspaper article that first reported the threat.
The Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat reported that Nokia wanted the laws, which bar companies from looking at private emails sent from company computers, relaxed. The handset maker, the world's largest, allegedly investigated one of its employees who the company had suspected of passing confidential information to Chinese equipment vendor Huawei, and in doing so, looked in his private email. The newspaper said that though this was illegal, no charges were brought because of a lack of evidence.
Nokia then lobbied the Finnish government to make changes in the laws, according to the newspaper, and threatened to leave the country if the laws were not changed. Nokia spokeswoman Arja Suominen denied the company had not threatened to move. "[The] Helsingin Sanomat article is quite polemic," she said. "It contains many mistakes and misunderstandings."
Nokia generates around $1.7 billion in tax revenues and employs 16,000 people in the country. The company, which still has the largest market share in the global handset market, reported a 69 percent drop in fourth quarter profits, driven by weak demand, and said that it predicted a 10 percent drop in handset shipments in 2009.
For more:
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Comments
Posted by Professor Nitwitz | February 2, 2009 - 5:33pm
Get Sweden or Russia to take over Finland. They know how to handle the Finns. They did it before.
That'll solve the privacy problem. Silly...humans still think they are entitled to privacy in today's modern digital consumer world. Imagine that!
Posted by Mark Squires | February 3, 2009 - 6:56am
There has been significant discussion within the media about a Finnish government-backed bill that proposes an amendment to the Act on Data Protection of Electronic Communications.
Much of the reporting on this issue, starting with an article in the Sunday edition of the Finnish daily Helsingin Sanomat, has been inaccurate and misleading.
As communicated by the wider Finnish business community, including the Confederation of Finnish Industries (www.ek.fi), the proposed legislation would offer clarity for Finnish business in the event that trade secrets are suspected to have been leaked. As a member of the Confederation of Finnish Industries, Nokia supports this proposed change in the law.
According to the proposed legislation, only in very exceptional circumstances, and only in accordance with stringent procedures, would it be possible for a company to consult email log data. Such data would reveal the sender and recipient’s names, but NOT the content of the email. Nokia stresses that it upholds the highest standards with regard to employees’ rights for privacy and other fundamental rights and has every intention to maintain such high standards in the future.
Nokia is astonished about the recent reporting on this issue and categorically denies making a threat to leave Finland, as claimed by the flawed Helsingin Sanomat article. That Nokia continues to have a significant presence in Finland is determined by business-related factors and is not influenced in the least by the proposed legislation discussed by the article.
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