Stay tuned for my upcoming post about two significant workplace privacy cases, the New Jersey Supreme Court’s March 30 decision in Stengart v. Loving Care Agency, Inc. and the April 19 arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in City of Ontario v. Quon. Both cases examine how far an employer can go in monitoring an employee’s digital messages, even if it adopts a IT use policy stating that the employee has no expectation of privacy in his or her communications using the employer’s computers and mobile devices.
In Stengart, as I predicted in my last post on the case, the New Jersey Supreme Court held that an employee did not waive her attorney-client privilege in her suit against the employer by accessing her personal Yahoo! e-mail account through a work computer and using it to communicate with her attorney (not a good idea, but still …). On the other hand, in Quon, where the police department accessed and reviewed a SWAT team member’s provocative texts from a department-issued pager, the situation is a little murkier, and the Court seems leery of making a grand statement about workplace privacy.
What does all of this mean for businesses seeking to avoid liability and manage use of corporate IT resources? As I said, more on this shortly.