Posted by denised in 
A supreme court ruling last week made it a little easier for companies to monitor employee cell phone and text use. The court ruled that employers have the right to read its workers text messages if they believe workplace rules are being broken.
The ruling came in the case of The City of Ontario v. Quon. Sergeant Jeff Quon sued the city, the police chief and the police department in 2004 claiming his supervisor’s search of his text messages violated his Fourth Amendment rights. Quon had been using his government issued pager to send sexually explicit messages. When Quon went over his allotted 25,000 character limit per month, his supervisor reviewed his pager use to determine whether the limit was enough for official purposes. That’s when Quon’s sexually explicit messages to his wife at the time, and his mistress were discovered.
Quon sued claiming that the city didn’t have a text-message policy in place when the pagers were issued. The city did have official policies about computer, Internet and email use that limited the use to official purposes.
While I typically come down on the side of the employee in many matters, I can’t side with Quon on this one. If Quon had been using his personal pager/cell phone to send messages, that would be a different story, but I think any adult who’s spent any time in the workforce should know that employers typically monitor the use of any equipment they’ve issued, whether that’s a laptop, cell phone or pager. And, while I might get a lot of heat for this, I think that it’s within their right to do so – particularly if there are limits on the amount and type of usage they allow. As an individual, if you want to send sexy text messages until the cows come home, by all means do so, but do it on your own phone, on your own service plan where your expectation of privacy is legitimate. Read the full story on Quon and the court ruling here.
Do you agree with the court ruling? How do you feel about privacy issues in the workplace? Share your thoughts in the comment section.
