Supreme Court to Hear Ontario Police SMS Text Message Privacy Case: Are Personal Text Messages Sent from Employer-supplied Devices Private?

Interesting news out today that the US Supreme Court has agreed to review a ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that sided with several several police officers who sued their employer, the Ontario (California) Police Department, for reading hundreds of personal text messages (supposedly some of them were of a sexually explicit nature) that the officers had sent and received on pagers issued to them by the department.

The finding by the 9th Circuit Court was cited in a recent Wall Street Journal article (see my earlier post "Reading Employee Email: Do Workers Have an Expectation of Privacy?") as evidence that courts are increasingly siding with employees in cases of electronic privacy violation.

CRN's ChannelWeb has a really good summary of the Ontario Police Department case that includes a lot of detail. See "Supreme Court to Weigh in on Employee Text Messaging Privacy." Writer Stefanie Hoffman notes that the City of Ontario appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court on the grounds that it's customary for employers to have policies that give them access to electronic communications sent by employees on employer-owned devices.

The Supreme Court is slated to rule on this issue in June 2010 and, should they find for the City of Ontario, it could set a new standard for employee privacy vis-a-vis employer-provided devices.

NetworkWorld also has some good coverage of this case (see "Supreme Court to Rule on Employee Privacy"), noting that the Supreme Court's decision could have repercussions that will impact compliance efforts. Writer Tony Bradley notes:

"Regulatory mandates such as SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley), HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), and GLBA (Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act) contain guidelines requiring that companies ensure certain information is protected, and that communications be archived for a certain period of time.

Companies can't meet some of these compliance requirements if the courts uphold an employee's right to privacy while using company equipment."

This tension between employee privacy and regulatory mandates that more-or-less require monitoring of outbound electronic communications is a theme that comes up regularly when I discuss findings from Proofpoint's own research on outbound email monitoring and data loss prevention (download a copy of our 2009 survey findings here).

It would seem that racy text messages are fully in the zeitgeist these days. Between Tiger Woods's travails, media hype around "sexting" and court cases like this one, it's impossible not to be aware of the privacy, policy and cultural issues around electronic messaging.

 
A quick check of BlogPulse's trend search (see illustration above) confirms that, indeed, there's a lot more chatter about these topics in recent weeks.

Links:

• ChannelWeb: Supreme Court to Weigh in on Employee Text Messaging Privacy
• NetworkWorld: Supreme Court to Rule on Employee Privacy
• Proofpoint: Outbound Email and Data Loss Prevention in Today's Enterprise, 2009

Comments

[Andi]

Interesting post. We can never really tell whether the employer-supplied devices remains private unless we do a trace on it. My advice is that employer-supplied devices should be used professionally which means it should only be used for work related purposes. SMS Marketing Software