If an employee sends a text or e-mail or posts on a blog or Facebook page using your equipment, Internet connections, and time, should you have the right to monitor them? That question is slowly being addressed in courts across the country, but it is so big with so many variables (what about e-mails sent on lunch break? texts sent from a company smartphone during an employee’s personal time? a post on a private Facebook page that mentions a coworker?) that there isn’t a concrete legal answer yet.

Besides, the courts are going both ways: read more…

In Quon v. City of Ontario, the 9th Circuit held that a California police department’s review of an officer’s text messages was an invasion of the officer’s right to privacy. In a unanimous ruling issued yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Quon decision and ruled that the police department’s review of the provocative text messages sent by the officer to his wife and to his mistress from his employer-issued pager, did not constitute an invasion of the officer’s privacy. (Link to the full opinion in City of Ontario v. Quon <http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-1332.pdf> ).

For employers, the key component of the decision is the Court’s focus on the fact that the police department-employer’s review of the messages comported with its policy and was conducted for a legitimate business reason. The department’s policy provided that messages would not be reviewed unless the employee went over the allotted monthly usage. In Quon, the officer had exceeded the monthly limit, and the department reviewed the messages to determine whether the overages were work-related. Officers were responsible for costs incurred for nonwork-related messages if they went over the monthly limit.

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