On Thursday 25 February 2010 11:32:37 am Andrew McNabb wrote: > "Under federal case law, when an employer realizes the call is personal, > he or she must immediately stop monitoring the call. (Watkins v. L.M. > Berry & Co., 704 F.2d 577, 583 (11th Cir. 1983)) However, when employees > are told not to make personal calls from specified business phones, the > employee then takes the risk that calls on those phones may be > monitored."
In other words, if the company has a policy prohibiting a behavior, they have the right to enforce it. If there was no such policy and later you are fired because you broke a non-existent policy, you can sue them for damages. That's civil law, which is not the same as criminal law. You can sue anyone for anything under civil law. (Whether you win or not, that's another story.) Criminal law is another matter. > Of course, this refers specifically to phone calls rather than to email, > but I feel justified in believing that the same principle holds. > Privacy laws for email may lag behind those for phone communications, > but we should still be able to talk about right and wrong without > assuming that an organization should be able to do anything it wants > without restrictions. The same applies to emails. I don't think they are monitoring personal emails, per se. They are monitoring network traffic. If something sparks their interest, then they (should) follow their procedures and deal with the problem. What's really interesting here, is the religious implications. Don't the scriptures say the sins of people will be published on the rooftops and that in the final judgment all our works will be made known? God and his angels are always watching, right? And they keep record of every good and bad deed we do, right? Are we going to sue God for violation of privacy? -- Alberto Treviño BYU Testing Center Brigham Young University -------------------- BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ The opinions expressed in this message are the responsibility of their author. They are not endorsed by BYU, the BYU CS Department or BYU-UUG. ___________________________________________________________________ List Info (unsubscribe here): http://uug.byu.edu/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
