Employer e-mail monitoring by David Yuri

The legislation referring to employer e-mail monitoring is still in an emerging phase that is quite unsettled at this point in time. In this brief article the privacy rights of non public-sector employees are debated as they are considered to be relatively unprotected by the federal and state regulations. It is true that there are various broad judicial interpretations of enacted privacy legislations that may encourage the legitimacy of employer e-mail monitoring practices as elements of common law claims are quite difficult to prove by employees.

The use of e-mail throughout business hours is quite a common characteristic of the 21st century workplace world wide. According to recent studies there are more than 130 million workers only in the US who are flooding recipients with approximately 3 billion e-mail messages per day and that is why e-mail monitoring services have also become popular among employers. E-mail services are provided as efficient means of facilitating intra-company communication and communication with the outside client bases. The e-mail serves increase the efficiency of the workflow as it is not expensive to provide, simple to install and easy to use. Also, e-mail usage has helped in the process of decreasing the use of office-related, paper-based correspondence. However, the need of e-mail monitoring services has increased as this technological advancement has also proven to create collateral problems. These issues occur when the use of e-mail services is directed towards employees' private life. It is important to note that the legal environment today seems to be quite unprepared as far as solving the e-mail monitoring problem is concerned. This legislative problem is mainly based on the fact that a lot of employees are not aware of their privacy rights concerning the company-provided e-mail accounts. Most employees draw the false assumption that their personal e-mail messages sent from work are protected from their employers' scrutiny.

It is common that employee privacy issues also arise in other areas of the work environment besides the e-mail monitoring. Some employers have even gone to the extent where they monitor employee phone calls and in some rare cases companies even record the time employees spend on their bathroom breaks. The use of e-mail monitoring services in order to observe the employees behavior actually represents an aspect of the legitimate struggle between the employer's ability to conduct its business operations and the employees' privacy rights. This is a serious struggle whose boundaries are continuously changing as far as the arena of workplace e-mail is concerned. The problem occurring from this rapid advancement is that neither the Constitution nor the state and federal legislations provide a clear concept referring to the extent of employee privacy rights as far as work-related e-mail accounts are concerned.

There are several companies that are marketing e-mail monitoring services with the purpose of full e-mail monitoring by use of applications to programs that can record the time used by employees to check their e-mail. Such a full e-mail application program records information like e-mail recipient, e-mail sender, number of words used, time spent reading e-mails, time spent composing e-mails, number of attachments,; and type of e-mail (business-related or non-business related). On the other hand, there are companies that use less-intrusive e-mail monitoring programs that pick up only information, such as employee name, date, and time the e-mail was read.

Some of these e-mail monitoring services may be considered as crossing the line between employers' legitimate business justifications and intrusion into employees' privacy. The present state of e-mail monitoring definitely creates a need for new legal rules and concepts that both employers and employees can have access to in case they need to defend their business practices or to remedy an invasion of their privacy.

It is recommended that employers who want to avoid liability for monitoring employee e-mail usage "take all necessary steps to eliminate any reasonable expectation of privacy that employees may have concerning their use of company e-mail...systems." (Lewis, supra, note 8) All this should be done via a company inside regulation that comprises a detailed electronic communications policy distributed regularly to all employees before any monitoring begins. The most important things that this policy should state include the fact that the employee is absent of any private rights while using the company e-mail and a thorough explanation of the rules governing the use of the e-mail system.
About the Author

More and more employers consider {a href=" http://www.SiteRecon.com"}e-mail monitoring as an action of reducing their employees' private messaging that conflicts with the workflow and create server overloading. This is why a lot of employers choose to solve this problem by means of an e-mail monitoring service needs.