A new study has found that about a third of businesses in the United States and Great Britain hire people to "read and analyze" their employee's outgoing e-mail messages. Reuter's reports:
According to a new study, about a third of big companies in the United States and Britain hire employees to read and analyze outbound e-mail as they seek to guard against legal, financial or regulatory risk.
More than a third of U.S. companies surveyed also said their business was hurt by the exposure of sensitive or embarrassing information in the past 12 months, according to the annual study from a company specializing in protecting corporate e-mail at large businesses.
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In both regions, 38 percent of respondents said they employed staff to read or otherwise analyze outbound e-mail. In the United States, 44 percent of companies with more than 20,000 employees said they hire workers to snoop on workers' e-mail.
Nearly one in three U.S. companies also said they had fired an employee for violating e-mail policies in the past 12 months and estimated that about 20 percent of outgoing e-mails contain content that poses a legal, financial or regulatory risk.
Remember when Bush said in 2000 that he would run America like a business? This must be what he means (i.e. PATRIOT Act).
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Well, if it's that high a number of people that are violating these emailing policies, they should do something. I just don't know if reading someone's email is right.
On the one hand, that's a huge privacy issue. But on the other, people shouldn't be sending personal emails out from work anyway; so nothing private *should* be found out. But, there should be some other way of monitoring, I just don't know what it would be for now.
And someone who's trying to email out of the office always uses the lame excuse of "everybody else does it" but they don't realize that mob-thinking like this isn't good.
Thousands of people cheat on their taxes, too; doesn't mean it's legal.
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"Dream as though you'll live forever, but live as though there's no tomorrow" --James Dean
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Privacy laws only work against employers if the employer tries to control what the worker does on their home computers outside of work.
Keep in mind that business e-mail and computers belong to a business. It's their private property and they have a legal right to privacy as well. Workers who negligently wander the internet viewing porn, downloading programs, sharing files, etc. can expose the company to viruses, spyware, adware, and liability. What do I mean by liablities? Say a worker is viewing porn and another worker is offended. The employer has a right to fire the worker because the offended worker could sue the company for sexual harassment under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Or if an employee is leaking company secrets using e-mail. The company has a right to fire the worker. If the worker sues for privacy rights, the company uses those e-mails as evidence. Companies also read and save employee e-mail as evidence against employees in court. For instance, a worker who sues a company for sexual harassment may say her boss sent her lewd e-mail. Or a worker may claim someone sent him an e-mail full of derogatory statements about African-Americans. The company will do an internal investigation, read the perpetrator's e-mail, and be scot-free in court.
Most companies have employees sign a piece of paper saying the employee will be fired if he violates the company's Use of Company Private Property policy. Then in the event an employee violates the policy, gets fired, and sues for invasion of privacy, the company can wave the piece of paper at the judge in court.
If an employess is sending out email with the company name after the @, then I would assume that the information should be able to be read by the company. I would consider it company property since whatever the person is communicating, they are communicating on behalf of the employer. I wouldn't want someone sending out a bunch of e-mails with my name attached to it giving out false or private information, neither do companies.
Any personal e-mails should go through a personal e-mail address.
Your email at work (or school for that matter) belongs to work (or school) and is therefore something they can go through, at will, with or without letting you know.
It isn't yours. Anything 'private' that you discuss in emails is not private and isn't much different than shouting it from the rooftops and complaining when people know about it.
Of course, your comparison to the Patriot Act and President Bush is also wholly wrong and wholly unrelated to business email.