Comments on: Supreme Court to Hear Case on Employer Access to Worker Messages

By: Quon Roundup on Employee Computer Privacy | Compliance Building

Quon Roundup on Employee Computer Privacy | Compliance Building — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 12:02:35 +0000

[...] of discussion about the Quon case focused on the lack of technology expertise by the Justices on the Supreme Court. Actually, [...]

By: Doug Cornelius

Doug Cornelius — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 19:08:11 +0000

I agree that the lines between the different types of electronic communication are blurring.

There are a few quirks with text messages, especially the vintage of this case. With a phone call, the content of the call is generally not stored. In this case, the text messages were retained. The content was held by a third-party it was not on the government’s system, so there was a seizure from a third party. The billing for text messages was based on the content itself (the number of characters in the content).

On top of this, the employer was the government.

Given all these factors, I don’t think we get much insight on employers’ ability to monitor the communications of their employees.

By: Matt Kelly

Matt Kelly — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 16:46:52 +0000

I could see one line of argument here that text messages should have the same expectations of privacy as a personal telephone call on a company phone, rather than an email– after all, the worker is using the same device, and technologically is now often using the same packet-switching IT structure as a regular phone. So what’s the real difference between a phone call and a text message?

That said, I don’t know what the reasonable expectation of privacy is for a personal phone call. But technologically speaking, the lines that separate phone, text and email messages have been erased– so whatever the standard is for one, logically it should apply to all.