Supreme Court to Hear Ontario Police Text Privacy Case Next Week: Potential Impacts on Workplace Email Monitoring?

Quick follow-up on a story I blogged about late last year (in Supreme Court to Hear Ontario Police SMS Text Message Privacy Case): The US Supreme Court is due to hear a case (Ontario vs. Quon) involving the privacy of text messages sent from employer-supplied devices next week.

National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" show aired a really good segment on this case this morning that really helps explain the facts of the case and the potential ramifications for employers (especially government organizations including police departments) that monitor electronic communications - such as text messages, email, and social media communications.

You can listen to that story or read a transcript here:

NPR: Should Personal Texts From Work Devices Be Private?

Though this particular case involves the privacy of text messages, the (government) employees that send them and the privacy of recipients (who may or may not be employees of the organization providing the messaging device in question), it's likely that the outcome of this case will have an impact on workplace monitoring policies in all types of industries (not just government) and for all types of electronic communication mediums.

Of course, employers have many legitimate reasons for monitoring the content of email, web messages and text messages sent from their organizations, not the least of which concerns about compliance with data protection regulations including HIPAA and GLBA.

Forgive me if you've heard this one before, but in our latest research on outbound email and data loss prevention, Proofpoint found that 13% of large US companies had investigated the exposure of confidential, sensitive or private information via an SMS text or Web-based short message service (e.g., Twitter). And 41% of those companies said that they are highly concerned about the risk of information leakage via Web-based short messaging.

You can find more such statistics in our full report.