Privacy of personal emails at work protected in France

guerby writes "On October, 2d the french "Cour de cassation" (France highest court) ruled that a company cannot monitor personal emails without breaking privacy protection offered by the law. The case was between a french engineer and his employer Nikon France. As I couldn't find any article in english on the subject here is one in Le Monde and a discussion on LinuxFR. Of course if you don't do anything but personal email, you can still be fired :)."

Comments

Full ruling URL

[guerby]

Here

Any URL in english?

What if it contains virii?

[Tim Locke]

Are admins still allowed to scan for viruses?

also in Canada

[rakerman]

The Globe and Mail reported on April 16, 2001 that the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, George Radwanski, said employees have a "fundamental, inherent right" to privacy in the workplace, and this includes the right to private e-mail.

The new federal privacy law pertaining to electronic documents, which took effect Jan. 1, stipulates that an organization may collect, use or disclose personal information "only for purposes that a reasonable person would consider appropriate." Mr. Radwanski, who has the authority to investigate and refer breaches of the act to the Federal Court of Canada, says "random snooping" through employees' e-mail boxes is clearly a breach.

Quick 'n dirty recap

[Teun]

The guy was hired in '91 and signed a non-competition paper.
In '95 an E-mail exchange with a competitor was found out.
The company claimed he agreed on hiring he could only use company supplied equipment for company business, the case went through the various courts.
The result centers around the European Directive on Fundamental Human Rights. According to the court this was breached when the company accessed a folder called "Private" on his computer and found the E-mail with a competitor. The fact that the E-mail did not cover the subject/nature of the guy's employment was also considered.
The court ruled the fundamental freedom of this individual of higher value than the agreament about business-only use of the computer.

The best part of it is that although Jurisprudence does not usually carry weight across borders, the reference to the European Directive is possibly usefull to for example Brits that have little to no protection under national law.

I've worked in both extremes

[Kris_J]

I've worked in a company where email is company property and can be "monitored" at the drop of a hat (with appropriate notification). Email can also be redirected if you're away or handed to your replacement if you leave. This system works really well.

And I've worked in a company where email is a private thing that the company won't touch. This means that if you're away your incoming email isn't dealt with, regardless of how important it is. This also means that when you leave you have to manually forward every work-related message to another address or the person taking over your job won't have a clue what's going on. This system barely works at all, and completely falls over for positions with a high turnover.

I believe a company email address is for company stuff and if you want to send and receive non-work-related emails then you should use your own personal account (from your own ISP or a Yahoo/Hotmail sort of thing). I don't understand this obsession with privacy protection on work resources -- even work phone-tap laws are becoming less relivant as more people get mobiles.

Re:I've worked in both extremes

[j-beda]

That's a good reason for the use of such email addresses as "marketing@foo.bar.com" and "support@foo.bar.com" rather than having web links and other documentation directing people to "chris@foo.bar.com" and "pat@foo.bar.com".

One of the first things to do with any new project should be to create the approriate email aliases and point them to the appropriate people, and then use those addresses for all material relating to the project. When people move on, the aliases can be repointed and the archive of email can be passed on too...