Contrary to the public's belief, emails are not a private or secure form of communication. This general misconception amongst employees has repeatedly resulted in legal quagmires and ethical dilemmas. "It's a situation that arises a million times a day in offices around the world. An employee has something personal to tell a co-worker.... Rather than pick up the phone or wander down the hall, he or she simply types a message on the desktop computer terminal and send it as electronic mail. The assumption is that anything sent by E-mail is private. That assumption unfortunately is wrong" (Gindin). Does your boss know what color underwear you were wearing during your romantic rendezvous last weekend? He very well could and according to the courts rightfully so, if you disclose such matters via email messages from your work computer. "Managers can legally intercept, monitor, and read employees email" (Shanon,Rosenthal).
Why do people assume that email is private? This assumption could seem reasonable, given that email can be accessed from a personal message service that requires a password to access, providing a false sense of confidentiality. Perhaps people who are familiar with the privacy protection of the U.S. mail system assume it applies to email as well. It is possible for someone to have a misconstrued faith in technological security when using electronic communication. These are only a few of the several possible reasons a person could mistakenly rationalize that email messages are free from interception. Unfortunately serious adverse ramifications may await employees who are unaware that their computer use can be monitored.
A very well known case involving email privacy is Shoars vs. Epson America, Inc. In this c...
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Shannon, J. and Rosenthal, D. "Electronic mail and privacy: Can the conflicts be
resolved?" Business Forum. 18 Winter/Spring 1993. 31-34.
Shea, Virginia "Company Policies on email content and privacy." Netiquette. 05/09/2003
http://www.albion.com/netiquette/book/0963702513p127.html
Shoars v. Epson America, Inc. No. BC 007036 Cal. Sup. Ct. filed 03/12/1991
Shoars v. Epson America, Inc. No. SWC 112749 Cal. Sup. Ct. filed 07/30/1990
Smyth v. Pillsbury, Co. C.A. No. 95-5712 Penn. Dist. Ct. filed 01/23/1996
Spykerman, Mike "Is email monitoring legal?" Red Earth Software. 05/09/2003
http://www.redearthsoftware.com
The decision to monitor e-mail is left to the organization that provides the e-mail service to users. These organizations can range from educational institutions and private corporations, to governments and non-profit organizations. Each of these different types of organizations has a different agenda and goals, not only in general, but also for their members-and more specifically, for their members' e-mail. While educational institutions can provide e-mail facilities to their constituents for the purposes of convenience, employers almost always maintain e-mail facilities for the sole purpose of improving the on-the-job productivity of their employees.
E-Communications are a vital part of most workplaces. Share your experience using e-communications at work or in the academic setting. Have you ever had any mishaps or felt someone was engaging in unethical or unprofessional behavior? Explain, keeping in mind the specific guidelines on pages 77-78.
Employers monitor email accounts and company computers mainly for two reasons. Reason one is that they don’t want their employees wasting company time for personal use. In most places, that is considered a very good reason, because if an employee is using company time for personal things, then work isn’t being done. Then it causes problems for everyone. Reason two is that employers want to make sure that employees aren’t doing anything illegal through either email or other internet sites.
Americans pride themselves on living private lives. They appreciate the fact that they live without being under the watchful eye of someone. However, increased electronic technology has made it harder to live privately. There are privacy issues regarding Internet Service Providers (ISP), electronic correspondences, and telephone calls. More directly with the creation and increased popularity of the Internet, people who use the World Wide Web are undoubtedly concerned with their private information being leaked. The technology allows people to track your Internet activities, steal your credit card information and “hack” into your e-mail accounts. With this increase in technology comes an increase in the level of concern.
Confidentiality – this is particularly important in the work environment. Mark anything up and private and confidential as a header. Attach a word document if necessary instead of writing the confidential information into the body of the email and password protect the document. Do not put the password in the body of the email. The safest way of sharing a password is by over the telephone as opposed to sending a separate email. Never disclose inappropriate personal information.
Smith, S. (2002). Rethinking e-mail monitoring in today's workplace. Westchester County Business Journal, 41(12), p. 4. Retrieved October 19, 2004, from EBSCOhost Database.
Terms and Laws have gradually change overtime dealing with different situations and economic troubles in the world in general. So then dealing with these issues the workplace has become more complex with little or no rights to privacy. Privacy briefly explained is a person’s right to choose whether or not to withhold information they feel is dear to them. If this something will not hurt the business, or its party members then it should be kept private. All employees always should have rights to privacy in the workplace. Five main points dealing with privacy in public/private structured businesses are background checks, respect of off duty activities/leisure, drug testing, workplace search, and monitoring of workplace activity. Coming to a conclusion on privacy, are there any limits to which employers have limitations to intrusion, dominance on the employee’s behavior, and properties.
While monitoring has been around for many years, employees think monitoring poses a bigger threat to his or, her privacy in the workplace. Even though it is unde...
Student José Amador likes to use his email account at yahoo.com. "I find paper so obsolete," he says. Amador is not worried about the privacy of this account. Perhaps he and the many other people that use yahoo email should be concerned, however. All users of Yahoo mail are having their actions tracked.
Reasonable expectation of privacy justified that the employee privacy was violated “if” the employer did not inform the employee that e-mails or text message sent from the employee personal account would be saved to a hard drive by a third party. As a result, the evidence confiscated cannot be used against her in a court of law under the exclusionary
The right to privacy is familiar to people in the recent one hundred years and public is increasingly interested in the right to privacy due to the progress of print media by the late 19th century (Solove et al. 2006, P9-11). The privacy law derived from the action for breach of confidence, but now the independent law of privacy is used by plenty of people to protect their private life and information (Hanna and Dodd 2012, P307).
...to your encrypted files then someone else could also. This issue should go one way or the other. It is either you take the risk of letting everyone have a chance to access what you wrote, or nobody has access to it. If nobody has access or control over what is going on then it could become a criminals play ground. Yet if we let people have access to our accounts, we have some degree of safety, at the cost of our privacy. I look at it this way if you don=t want people to see your underwear drying on a close line don=t put them on the line to start with. The same goes for your E-mail if you don=t want other people to read it then don=t send it. It is the same thing with keeping a secret once you tell one person they could tell some one else, that is why they say that three people can keep a secret if two are dead.
1. Unknown. Privacy in Cyberspace: Rules of the Road for the Information Superhighway (Aug 2003). Privacy Rights Clearing House. 29th March 2004. http://www.privacyrights.org/netprivacy.htm
In Australia, Employers should implement best practice on how to maintain privacy in the workplace in accordance with the privacy standards set out in the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) (Welcome to the Fair Work Ombudsman website. n.d.). Privacy is able to keep our own personal information private and also able to do things without any electronic monitoring in the workplace. Nowadays, many company increased the usage of technology such as internet and email in the workplace. This can create issues in privacy. When employees’ access to web browsing activities during working hours, the employer can be scrutinized it. Employers take this action due to fear lawsuit if employees act in inappropriate ways. Therefore, the best policy is to explain clearly how is appropriate to use email and internet at work and outline what type of use is prohibited in the workplace. Besides that, employer also needs to ensure the employee didn’t disclose or disseminate any important information to the competitors or
Internet technology is accelerating the rate of globalization. Email, in particular, is now one of the fastest ways for us to communicate with each other, and to do business, making our world much smaller and more immediate. This same technology that can enhance our lives and accelerates the pace of global change can also destroy our personal privacy at the same rate.