Well Yeah, But no Guarantees

Use a PDA or smart phone and route personal message on it as well as business messages? Well the 9th circuit court says you have the right of privacy for those messages. Even if those messages are on business devices.

A federal appeals court has made it more difficult for employers to snoop legally on e-mails and text messages their workers send from company accounts. Under Wednesday’s ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, employers that contract an outside business to transmit text messages can’t read them unless the worker agrees.

Users of text-messaging services “have a reasonable expectation of privacy” regarding messages stored on the service provider’s network, Judge Kim Wardlaw wrote in the three-judge panel’s unanimous opinion.

The ruling limits employers’ access to employee e-mail on internal servers.

The text-message part of the ruling will affect more employers than the e-mail portion because most U.S. companies pay outside parties for text-messaging but keep e-mail on internal servers, analysts said.

Well there are issues with this. Internal Servers protected too? What if the employee is trafficing in porn on their personal mail that traverses the employers servers? I see a big legal conflict here. What is to be the IT protocol to manage these dual use handhelds? If the content is to be unflinched then the only proper course might be to flush the whole device. What a hassle.

Well I have a suggestion. Why not flip the tables? If you buy the handheld for personal use and business as well then the issues tend to disappear legally. All the employee has to do is agree to flush the business feed and contents on the handheld. Given some analysis, employers will come to this conclusion as well.

Linky.