Surviving the Workday

Scott Sidwell was fired from an investment firm. He used yahoo email at work. He forgot to log out. He alleges that the company that fired him read his email once he had been fired, including emails between him and his attorney discussing strategies for suing the former employer.

This story is just loaded with the sort of stuff that makes me paranoid at work. For example, we assume that an employer can monitor all of our work email all of the time, right? We know this. Often we sign something acknowledging that we know. It’s far murkier legally in terms of whether an employer can monitor your web-based email (yahoo, gmail, hotmail). I would assume that anything that shows up on screen is fair game, but apparently many employeees consider this stuff secret.

Here’s a summary of the legal stuff:

The law governing e-mail communications is still evolving. Generally, courts have found that employers can monitor employees’ e-mail communications on company computers. But courts have also recognized greater privacy protection for e-mail messages sent using personal, Web-based e-mail accounts. For example, this month a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in California ruled that personal text messages sent on two-way pagers provided to police officers in Ontario, Calif., were protected from the department.

Mr. Sidell’s case gives the courts an opportunity to address other questions, said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. “This case raises a lot of new issues that reflect the changing place of e-mail in the work place,” Mr. Rotenberg said. “We have Web-based e-mail, which is not directly under the control of the employer.”

In addition to concerns about privacy in the workplace, Mr. Sidell’s claim involves communications between a lawyer and a client. “It’s a nice set of factors that are all compacted into this,” said Matt Zimmerman, senior staff attorney in the San Francisco office of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit civil liberties organization that seeks to protect privacy rights online.

An employer’s ability to read messages worries office workers everywhere, not least because e-mail messages have figured in criminal cases like the one brought last week against two former Bear Stearns hedge fund managers. People disclose all manner of personal information in e-mail messages, in the expectation — perhaps unfounded — that what they type will remain confidential.