Firm paid for text messages; can it read them?
December 15, 2009 by Sam NarisiPosted in: Communication, Employment law, HR Tech, In this week's e-newsletter - Tech, Latest News & Views
If employees send text messages on the company’s dime, the company should be able to monitor them, right? Maybe not, according to recent court decisions.
An employer gave cell phones to a group of employees so they could communicate via text messages. The contract with the wireless provider said the company would be charged an overage fee if any phone sent more than a certain number of messages in a given month. Employees had to reimburse the company for those charges.
After one employee went over his limit four times, the company obtained copies of his messages from the wireless provider. The transcripts revealed the employee was sending a lot of personal messages — in fact, many of them were sexually explicit.
The employee was disciplined, but sued, claiming his privacy was violated when the vendor provided — and the company read — his personal messages.
A jury ruled in favor of the company, before an appeals court reversed the decision. The reason: The messages weren’t the company’s property because they were stored by a third-party vendor (unlike company e-mail, which is often held on the company’s own network).
Now, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case. We’ll keep you posted on the outcome.
Cite: Quon v. Arch Wireless
Tags: e-mail, privacy, text messages
December 22nd, 2009 at 3:30 pm
Google “Kwame Kilpatrick,” former Mayor of Detroit.
December 22nd, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Corporate Compliance measures, which were mandated to have to be instituted due to the fallout from Enron and Tyco and other companies with corruption that nobody took responsibility for, cover this by stating up front in the recommended IT policies “No expectation of privacy.” I know ours was taken directly from the boilerplate we were given when we were forced to create the Corporate Compliance program. It’s labeled “CC008.”
Any technology item owned and paid for by the company is the property of the company and hence, anything that is done with the equipment is the property of the company, NOT the employee.
Combine this with the updated federal rules of discovery for electronic documentation requiring the ability to produce many of these types of communications for legal purposes, the employee should never have gotten any further than the lawsuit being denied by the court.
The Supreme Court should slap this person and their legal representation so hard that their heads spin.
Where the information is stored is immaterial. Many companies use external servers contracted through providers and if you think that just because it wasn’t on the internal company network that it’s not still the property of the company, you are sorely mistaken.