You sent an email from your company computer, but you used your password-protected Yahoo account. That’s private, right? Well, not necessarily so. It depends on your company’s policy and where you live, and perhaps to whom you sent it. For instance, in one case in New Jersey, a company was found in violation of attorney-client privilege for reading the email of an employee who contacted her counsel through her Yahoo account, but in a similar case in California, the company was found not to have violated the same law because the employee used a company’s email account.
In fact, employers have wide protection when it comes to monitoring the activities of employees using company equipment. However, the law is not as clear when it comes to using your own mobile device at your place of employment. Many employers allow workers to use their own devices (called bring your own device or BOYD) instead of or in addition to company-owned equipment. Here the law is not as cut and dried and raises many challenges for companies that allow such usage.
Balancing the needs of companies to monitor for security and productivity against the need for worker privacy is a tight-wire act, which is why many companies have begun using employee monitoring software services such as Teramind. In most cases, the courts decide in favor of business needs over individual privacy.
What rights does a company have to monitor employees? This is a sticky wicket, because employee place monitoring is largely unregulated, which means that your employer can monitor all your communications as well as track your efficacy on your terminal. In most situations, it is company security or productivity that is at issue. Nonetheless, don’t assume that because something is marked private or confidential that it will not be read. Even physical mail delivered to you at your workplace can be legally opened by anyone with that authority, including mailroom workers.
In general, if the company owns the network and terminals, they have the right to monitor what you do on those monitors. Some monitoring enables administration to see what’s on the screen and what is stored in hard drives or the terminal. Some monitors keystrokes, especially for those employees who work in data entry or intensive word processing. (This particular kind of monitoring has led to workplace stress-induced illness and carpal tunnel syndrome.) Other monitoring can keep track of how much a person is not on his or her computer.
In some cases, union contracts can prevent a company from monitoring employees at all or at least under certain situations. Unreasonable search and seizure under the Fourth Amendment may provide some minimal rights to those in the public sector.
From the company’s point of view, monitoring helps improve workflow, keeps employees honest, and provides security from data theft. Some methods of monitoring can actually detect theft in real time and lock a user out. Suspicious activity can alert administration before damage can be done. Data from monitoring employees can help the company define policies that are needed to improve workflow and make sensitive data secure.