Monitoring Employee Email: Possible Legislation

Did you know your company is allowed to secretly monitor your internet and phone usage? ComputerNewsDaily reports that California Governor Gray Davis is considering a bill to stop employers in that state from monitoring employees' email - unless they first warn them in writing. (Strangely, the Governor's office seemed to become aware of the problem when their own secret monitoring caught an employee sending too much email. Stop me before I spy again!)

E-mail monitoring is big business

[Seth Finkelstein]

There's a whole bunch of products just trying to cash in. Check out, for example, Message Inspector [elronsoftware.com]. Scary stuff.

- The Boston Lunatic

Ethical / Legal

[JM_the_Great]

First off, let me say that I don't think any half way decent employer would monitor an employees e-mail, telephone, internet usage and whatever else without a reason to believe that he doing anything wrong.

However, if the employee is using their equipment, on their time, with their money, then, sure they can _legaly_ monitor them. This dosen't make it right, it just makes it legal. It shouldn't be up to the government, it shuld be up to the people.

One thing I've noticed on slashdot (and everywhere else, for that matter) is that we are opposed to all government involvement, except when it benefits us. The only way we can ever have a truly free country is if the government works for everybody, and the only way to do that is for it to work for nobody.

That's my $(2^4*3+1/7%3*2/100)

I support external monitoring.

[Trolld]

I was a sysadmin for a small company, and I kept tabs of every little thing that happened with our servers, mail server included.

I used a "pretend I'm the post office" method. I could look at a message's outside, (ie; sender/reciever), Weigh the message (size), and I could make sure that there wasn't an excess of them going in and out.

This kept everyone happy, I could rest assured that an employee wasn't running a spam service from the mail server, and the employees had the piece of mind that I wasn't paging through thier mail.

That being said, doing anything personal and or non business related on your work e-mail account is just asking for it. Of course that's easy for me to say (working at an ISP, having many shell accounts, blah blah), but in the day and age of @yahoo @hotmail and @excite etc addresses being free, there are better ways to e-mail your best friend with that list of "image" websites you collected over the week end.

Even if it was made illegal to read employees mail, the only people who would be in a position to report it would be the ones doing it.

"Who will watch the watchers?"

It's an education bill

[jflynn]

There is a real problem that comes from people assuming that the similarity in name between mail and e-mail implies that the same privacy conditions apply. This law essentially mandates educating employees that this is in fact not the case; company e-mail is more like a letter stored in a filing cabinet to which your boss has a key.

Compared to the price of installing and maintaining the surveillance it seems a reasonable one-time cost. It should keep problems from occurring, as well as merely helping to catch them once they do.

I think I will still strongly prefer employment by those that don't feel the need to spy on me, but it's a good bill for those without the choice.

Um... they already warn you in writing

[lordsutch]

Most places have acceptable use policies that indicate that individuals using their systems are subject to monitoring. At Ole Miss, you have to sign a copy of the AUP to get an account (hell, you have to sign a copy to get an additional account). I'm not seeing what's so surprising here.