Technology: Personal Smartphones for Work Purposes

The Wall Street Journal has a good piece on the increased intermingling by employees of their personal smartphones for work purposes: So You Want to Use Your Iphone for Work? Uh-Oh.  I use my personal iphone for work a lot, whether it's placing calls, texting contacts, taking notes, or of course checking my email.  My main concern has been that people at the office will see me twiddling with it and assume I'm playing Angry Birds or something (I prefer Pac-Man anyway).  The WSJ article does not address my concerns, but it centers on security issues since non-Blackberry smart phones don't have top notch security, smart phones are easily lost or stolen, and employees might leave a company with all kinds of sensitive business documents on their personal phone.   I wonder what other pitfalls there are for commingling personal smart phones with work purposes.  If an employee gets into an accident while texting his boss from his personal phone on his otherwise personal time, is he covered under workers' comp? Is the employer liable for the accident?  Would it be discriminatory to only hire candidates who own fancy personal phones (that way the employer doesn't need to buy company Blackberries)?  Is an employee making all of his private phone conversations, emails, texts, web browsing (i.e. facebooking), Angry Birds usage, etc. topics for discovery in suits against his employer by using his personal phone for work purposes?


I'll be attending the ABA National Symposium on Technology in Labor and Employment Law tomorrow and Friday.  Hopefully I'll come away with some answers to these questions.