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

[rsborg]

what if she used her private email to send email with sensitive company info to a competitor?

What's stopping her from putting a file into her briefcase/backpack and taking it home and sending it there? What about thumbdrives or synched cell-phones (which allow file-storage)?

Face it, unless the worker is in a secured area, the "need to monitor all traffic to prevent leaks" is borderline paranoiac. There needs to be an appropriate level of trust (this includes carrots and threats-of-sticks) for any worker to be productive.