E-Mails May Be Used As Evidence Against You
By Teresa Ambord
Can you be in legal trouble for the e-mails you send? Maybe, especially when you send questionable e-mails at work.
People who wouldn't dream of committing certain thoughts, opinions, or feelings to paper for fear that the communication would fall into the wrong hands, think nothing of writing a heated e-mails. Many people still treat e-mails as though they were telephone calls that vanish when they are received. But deleting an e-mail message from a computer's hard drive doesn't completely eliminate it. Instead it is moved to a different part of the computer and renamed.
Why is this important? Generally, employers can read your e-mails. In fact, some 60 percent say they do. Are they just being nosey? Maybe. But more and more, e-mail messages are being introduced as evidence in court cases. Some say e-mails and instant messaging are now the first line of legal offense for attorneys. If your employer is sued, you can bet the company's e-mails will be subpoenaed. Employers are subject to the principle of vicarious liability. That is, if you are sending inappropriate e-mails at work, your company can be held responsible if problems arise.
Here are some real examples of the trouble unwary e-mailers have found themselves in. and as you'll see, these written communications can cause the blame to swing both ways.
- An employee of Microsoft sued the company, claiming sexual harassment by a supervisor. Microsoft's defense fell flat when a search of company e-mails showed the supervisor had been sending the employee off-color jokes. A federal court agreed with the plaintiff.
- In another case, the shoe was on the other foot. An employee sued her company claiming her supervisor was causing her great distress by asking questions about her personal dating history. These questions offended her, she said, because she was deeply religious, holding to strict morals. She lost the case when her work e-mails were searched, revealing that she'd sent hundreds of pages of dirty jokes and pornographic materials.
- In a third case, an executive may have sunk his employer when he wrote an e-mail that detailed an unscrupulous practice his company was involved in. Again, a search of e-mails turned up this communication, which might have been the last nail in the coffin for the executive's company.
- E-mail abuse has also caused mass firings when the practice was discovered by such employers as Xerox, The New York Times, Dow Chemical, and even the Clinton White House.
How can you know if your employer is reading your e-mails?
You can't. But you do have some protection thanks to the law known as the Electronics Communication Privacy Act. This law makes it illegal to conduct unauthorized searches of e-mails if the employee has a reasonable expectation of privacy. For example if your employer states that the company will not read your e-mails and encourages you to choose a password, that may constitute a reasonable expectation of privacy. But suppose your employer includes in the company handbook a policy stating that e-mail is for work-related use only, and warning that e-mails you send may be monitored. If that's the case where you work. watch out. There's a good chance someone is or can read your e-mails.
How can you protect yourself?
Just use common sense. Don't write any e-mail at work that you wouldn't feel comfortable having a coworker or your employer read. As for your private life, you're on your own. Divorces have been initiated when spouses found incriminating e-mails that revealed infidelity. And crimes have been unearthed and prosecuted based on e-mail evidence. For example, a Washington state man who used a library computer to e-mail sexually explicit materials to a minor was surprised to find his communications were not so secret. An informant discovered and printed the messages and turned them over to the FBI. Busted!
The bottom line is, watch what you say in e-mails unless you wouldn't mind having your words read before a jury some day.
