Warrant needed to look at staff messages

EMPLOYERS IN THE US will be frantically changing their privacy policies after the Appeals court told them they would need a warrant or the employee's permission to see messages that aren't stored on site.

The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, has ruled that employers cannot look on their employee's wireless devices to see what emails or messages are stored there.

A lower court had said employers can look at text messages because they're stored by the outside contractors. The 9th Circuit ruled that since employers are paying only for messaging services they do not have access to their employee's mails.

Practically it means that employers will need to get an employee's written permission to access messages.

Joel Reidenberg, a professor at the Fordham University School of Law and an expert on information privacy law told AP that a ruling like this is going to force companies to be more careful in their data management.

The ruling is as a result of a lawsuit filed by police officers in the Southern California city of Ontario. The coppers claim that the police department illegally examined text messages they sent from work-issued pagers.

The officers argued that the department shouldn't have been able to view the messages without their approval or a court order. µ

L'Inq
AP