SC to decide on employees’ right to privacy on office device

The lower court has already ruled in the favor of sergeants Jeff Quon and Steve Trujili, stating that employees could expect certain amount of privacy even on office equipment and department chief’s decision to read their e-mails without a suspicion of any wrong doing on their part was wrong.

If SC decides to uphold lower court’s ruling, then some kind of guidelines are expected to be set in place to provide employees’ certain amount of privacy on the use of office equipment.

Even duo’s lawyer, Dieter Dammeier, has submitted a written request to SC to uphold lower court’s decision in 2008 stating, "The Ninth Circuit properly found that the search was excessively intrusive."

Start of the whole issue
The whole issue started back in 2002 when Ontario, California, police department provided their SWAT team with pagers. Each member on the team was allotted 25,000 characters of free texting each month on their pagers. They will have to pay up themselves to keep the device working if they exceeded the limit.

The lower court has already ruled in the favor of sergeants Jeff Quon and Steve Trujili, stating that employees could expect certain amount of privacy even on office equipment

Reportedly, police chief also had an unwritten rule of not examining officers’ messages as long as they kept their end of the bargain.

However, one day chief suddenly decided to check how officers’ are using their pagers and was shocked to find out that Sgt. Jeff Quon had exchanged several sexually explicit text messages with his estranged wife, girlfriend and his fellow officer.

The chief confronted the officer and after finding out about chief’s decision to look into their personal messages, people involved sued the department for privacy infringement.

People use office equipments for personal use all the time?
According to survey report by ePolicy Institute and the American Management Association in 2009, many people these days spend too much time at their work places. As a result personal and professional boundaries have blurred.

Survey reported that 79 percent of employees had used office devices to send or receive personal messages at one time or another.

Further, 83 percent of employers already have rules and regulations in the office that forbids the personal use of company equipment and 23 percent have fired employees for breaking that rule.

Also, 73 percent of employers use technological tools to automatically monitor e-mails send by employees from office equipment.

Nancy Flynn, executive director at the ePolicy Institute and the author of ‘ The ePolicy Handbook’ believe SC’s involvement in the case “could be a game changer when it comes to monitoring by employers and electronic privacy for employees.”