With a recent ruling, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals determined that employees have the right to privacy when sending text messages on company owned devices where information is stored on a third party server. This contradicts previous practices where the company has full disclosure over everything done on company property.
In Quon V. Arch Wireless, the issue began when a police department issued pagers that could send and receive text messages. After an investigation it was found that several officers were consistently going over the characters allowed to be sent/recieved per month. Officials requested that the service provider hand over transcripts of the archived messages to see if the overage charges were being caused by non-work related messages. After reviewing the text messages the officials noticed that not only were many of the messages personal, some contained sexually explicit content. Officer Quon responded by saying that according to informal policy and regular practice, as long as officers covered the overage charges, no audits would be conducted.
constitutional privacy rights because theyThe courts said that “the search of the text message violated their Fourth Amendment and California had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the context of text messages. Yet, we do not endorse a monolithic view of text message users’ reasonable expectation of privacy, as this is necessarily a context-sensitive inquiry”. They went on to say that e-mails stored on an email providers servers for backup protection after delivery to the recipient— were in “electronic storage” and protected under the statute and received ECS protection.
This ruling has two results that give increased privacy. First, employers need a warrant to get your email and text messages if covered under “stored communications act” as many third party services do. Second, even if your employer pays for your use of third party text or email services, your boss can’t get copies of your messages from that provider without your permission.
In addition to the suit against Arch Wireless for violation of the “stored communications act”, the officers also claim that the city violated their fourth amendment rights. The city stated that the original reason for the inquiry was to determine whether the overages were from work use so they could decide whether to upgrade to a more extensive service plan with from Arch Wireless. The Courts ruled against the city stating that they violated fourth amendment rights by not seeking out less obtrusive ways to learn this information.