NJ Court Upholds Privacy of Personal Emails At Work

chiguy sends word of a ruling from the New Jersey Supreme Court which found that a company did not have the right to read emails from an employee's personal account even through the account was accessed on a company computer. This ruling is likely to set precedent for other workplace privacy cases around the country. "'The court has recognized the very legitimate and real concerns with regards to privacy. This gives some guidance to employers in terms of how explicit (e-mail) policies need to be,' [attorney Marvin Goldstein] said. The ruling stems from a harassment and discrimination lawsuit Marina Stengart of Bergen County filed three years ago against Loving Care of Ridgefield Park. Stengart, then the executive director of nursing, sent her attorney eight e-mails from her company-loaned laptop about her issues with her superiors. Stengart used her Yahoo e-mail account. 'Under all of the circumstances, we find that Stengart could reasonably expect that e-mails she exchanged with her attorney on her personal, password-protected, web-based e-mail account, accessed on a company laptop, would remain private,' Chief Justice Stuart Rabner wrote in the decision, which upholds an appeals court’s ruling last year."

Comments

Re:Still probably violates company policy

[BitZtream]

These policies are rules made by busy bodies that feel a need to insert their nose into someone's business.

No, these policies are made by people finding it increasingly difficult to get rid of shitty employees without getting sued. Now days if an employee does something that clearly isn't acceptable, but isn't in some handbook, you get sued for firing them ... so ... they have to make so many rules to cover all the retarded 'little' things people do that can occasionally cause major problems.

Especially since the Constitution was really set up to protect the individuals right to privacy, that the government seems so willing to defer that right because a business is involved is very scary.

Thats retarded. The person has an easy way to keep their privacy, don't do it on the work PC. Do it at home, on your own time, away from their resources. What you're saying is that basically its the companies responsibility to keep things private ... even if she walks in to the office and starts screaming about these private things at the top of her lungs. Okay, thats an obvious exaggeration, but the point remains, she gave up her privacy by using a shared non-private resource. The constitution is there to protect privacy, not stupidity. What she did was fucking stupid.

Does the company have a right to read her personal email? Not one bit.

Does the company have the right to do whatever it wants with its equipment and network? Beyond any shadow of a doubt, YES. Including reading emails left on the drive, be it in the browser cache or saved to files or in some email client. They can sniffer her web sessions to yahoo all day long when she's using their resources. If she wants to keep them out of it, she shouldn't be using their resources. Period.

Your rights end when they start effecting someone elses rights. Hers ended when she used equipment that wasn't hers.

Our company policy is simple: You can use your PC for anything that is non-disruptive to work, is not a violation of your employement contract specific (i.e. no selling secrets and all that standard stuff), and its not illegal. However, the computers and everything on them are company property and you have no privacy on them. You sign a document (more detailed of course) stating the rules and that you've been made aware of them, THEN you get a PC.

You don't have to sign the document. You also don't have to work for us. Its okay, we don't mind if you don't, there are plenty of people who aren't so retarded as to think someone else's equipment is their private playtoy.

This has become an issue once. We found after an employee was released and brought back their laptop that they had been making deals on the side and essentially prepping customers to be stolen when they left the company. After several weeks of telling the person to return their laptop they finally did, at which point we dissected it with a fine tooth comb, not actually looking for anything (we suspected nothing at the time) its simply standard procedure to try and find loose ends with customers so nothing gets left hanging. The employee had 'formatted' the drive, which of course we promptly recovered.

The judge didn't care about any of it or how it happened, all he cared was that we found the evidence on our equipment. To which we explained to him that yes we had, both on the laptop and on our own mail servers.

We were 'sued' because we saw documents relating to his divorce settlement. The judges response was something along the lines of 'you signed a document stating you were aware that company equipment can be monitored and is not considered private, why are we here exactly?'

and that was that ...

If we had hacked into his yahoo account with no prior knowledge of it, we'd be wrong. But the instant the data hit our equipment or services we get full right to it.

Simple solution ... DON'T USE COMPANY EQUIPMENT FOR PRIVATE MATTERS DUMB ASS.

Of course, these are the same morons that sue when their facebook photos get 'leaked to the web' because they were 'private'.