Ongoing History Daily: The iPod workplace ban

At one point, it seemed like everyone had an iPod for listening to music. And for a while, there were some places of business that banned employees from listening to iPods while working.

There were a couple of reasons for this.

First, server space used to be relatively expensive and employers didn’t want workers saving their MP3s to their drives at work. If, say, 3,000 people each saved 5,000 songs to the network, that was a lot of server space back in the day.

But the bigger problem was security. MP3 devices like iPods were really just portable hard drives. Unauthorized copying and transferring of company data was easy if you knew what you were doing. Data theft was seen as a very real threat. That’s the real reason so many companies banned the use of iPods at work back in the day.

Yesterday’s post explained the artwork for U2’s Unforgettable Fire album.