Slashdot Mirror
Supreme Court Says Gov't Employee Texts Not Private
e9th writes "The Supreme Court, in a 9-0 ruling, has decided that government employers are entitled to examine all text messages sent with government-provided devices, even if the employee has agreed to pay for any excess message charges out of his own pocket. While the ruling only applies to government employees (at all levels), it may give private sector employees something to think about when using employer-provided devices."
Couldn't an employee just use their own phone to send private texts?
The ruling was for devices provided by the government, did you expect anything less? If it was for your own personal phone, that would be different.
Your employer having access to things you do with IT equipment they furnish is pretty much standard operating procedure, and has been for some time now. I'm having some trouble understanding how this even got to the Supreme Court. The fact that the government allowed them to use the devices for personal messaging doesn't mean that it gave up the right to see what they were doing with them.
My wife’s job wanted her to use her personal Blackberry for work emails and such. I told her that you always have to keep it separate because: - what if you leave? - what if we go over our data? Are they going to pay the overage? can we prove it was because of work stuff? - what if you accidently send work things to personal contacts and vice versa? It opens too many issues. If work wants you to have a device for work, they provide and pay for it and you use it ONLY for work. Simple.
K Man
it may give private sector employees something to think about when using employer-provided devices
Not really, I've always assumed nothing is private on employer provided devices, no matter who my employer.
SMS is broadcast over the air unencrypted. There should be no expectation of privacy.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Would this also lead to your own personal device that an employer pays a portion of the bill to also give them rights to view your records? I bought my device and have an account in my name, but my employer reimburses a portion of the bill to me since I am on call every other week and get pages sent via SMS to the device.
Confucius say: "Man who associates with smarter men than himself is smarter than the men he associates with."
It seems like there is an interesting business opening here: Selling multiple contracts for a single device. It shouldn't be too hard to write some software that allows users to switch context on a device to separate work and personal stuff. Get to it, you money hungry corporate sharks!
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
My first reaction was like most here - it's an employer-provided device, so why would you expect privacy? However, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act says that while employers have the right to monitor employee's phone conversations, they must stop if/when they realize that the conversation is personal, not business.
http://www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs7-work.htm#2a
So this is a mobile phone, not a landline, and it's texting not talking, which just complicates an already murky law.
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
After someone like Kwame Kilpatrick (former mayor of Detroit) exchanged 14,000 text messages with his chief of staff (both married to other people), most of which were related to their sexual affair with one another and others which were about illegally firing another government employee and I believe a bribery scandal (this has been local news here for a while), I'm not surprised they are finally doing this.
What I'd really like to know, is how the hell someone could send 14k text messages between September/October 2002 and April/May 2003. All the illegal and corrupt stuff aside... If that time period is accurate that means they were exchanging over 50 text messages a day... what the fuck.
They seem to think this is a positive ruling, which is at odds with this slashdot post.
It's not at odds. It only seems that way:
"Today's S. Ct. decision in Quon v Ontario at http://eff.org/r.4mq (pdf) assumes w/o deciding that 4th am protects privacy of txt msgs (yay!)"
That's completely accurate. The opinion holds that it is assumed but not decided that Quon had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the text messages (see e.g. III-A [p. 9]).
A REOP doesn't mean you can't be searched. It means that searches have to comply with the Fourth Amendment. This search did comply, given the workplace exception, pp. 15-16, and therefore the city is entitled to conduct such audits of the equipment it pays for.
My employer claims the right to monitor anything I do with my work computer or on the work network...which is fine, it is their equipment after all.
Presumably that would include me accessing my private Hotmail/Yahoo account from the work computer.
Put in a FIOA request...
The bottom line is this: as long as an EMPLOYER can be sued for the conduct of an EMPLOYEE in relation to a job (and use of employer-provided equipment counts), the employer for its own protection must have the right to take steps to mitigate that risk.
There is also a strange idea that an employee has a right to use employer-provided equipment and services for personal use. That's a myth. If the employer is kind enough to allow you to use company equipment and services for personal use (such as me posting this from work), that's a courtesy and a kindness, not a right, and if there are self-defense strings attached like monitoring, that's the employer's prerogative. Don't like it? Don't use it. I could be doing this from my smartphone or from home.
Employers wouldn't do this if they didn't have to. Monitoring costs time and money. Monitoring happens in response to abuses by employees which have proven to be very costly to the employer. You can lay the blame for this at the feet of employees who have gotten their employers dragged into court and fined millions, resulting in the employer having to fire the innocent as well as the guilty to make up for the cost of the lawsuit. Or, in extreme cases, go out of business altogether... all because Charlie Assgrab surfed porn and Suzy StickUpHerAss saw it and told the law firm of Wi, Fukkem & Howe.
The solution? Get rid of these terrible tort laws that allow employers to be sued for actions of an employee that were clearly not ordered by the employer. Someone grabbed your ass? Get your million from the grabber, not the nearest target that actually happens to have a million.
Until the greed goes away, until individuals are held responsible for individual actions, employers will take draconian measures to protect themselves from a draconian threat. Put down the lawyer and we'll turn off the packet logger.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
we just kind of assume employers occasionally audit the use of company property. That includes physical things likes computers, pagers, cellphones. And virtual things like company networks(what use internally), VPN usage, company internet gateways(what sites you access externally), company IM services(jabber, lotus sametime, whatever), emails, and file servers.
It is not unusual for an IT department to look at your back-ups and question your judgment in filling your work computer's backup folder with personal MP3s.
Just because you take a phone and laptop home every night doesn't mean it is your personal property.
it just seems obvious that government employees would have to operate under the same environment as the rest of us. Maybe if the government operated like they can fail if they don't behave in a competitive way some of our problems would just go away. That's just wild conjecture on my part though.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
But I do have a work laptop. And there's a lot that I won't do on it that I do all the time on my home machine. The fact is, my work machine isn't really MY machine! It's their's! So, I do my business on their crap, and have fun on my own crap.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
You get a work phone, it's work's property. Don't do shit with it you don't want your employer to see.
If you work in public sector, don't do or say things on it you don't want the public to know.
There's a limited amount of real estate on my body. Requiring me to carry a device when I'm not on the clock and claiming the right to review everything I do with it seems too intrusive. Sure, I can carry two phones, but why should I have to?
Now if you can provide me a device with two lines, one private and one for work, you can go ahead and knock yourself out spying on my work line. I work for a state government and pay for my own phone because it's not worth dealing with the crap that comes attached to a work phone.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.