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But is it legal?
On an increasing basis, employees are insisting that they have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the workplace. Virtually all employers tolerate at least some personal telephone calls, knowing that morale would suffer dramatically if they did not. Employees argue that e-mail has in many instances replaced the need for these kinds of calls, and they point out that almost everyone's sensibilities would be offended if employers eavesdropped on a personal telephone call to a spouse, or child, or doctor. So why should e-mail be any different? Individual privacy, free from surveillance, is a hallmark of a civilized society, and the rights of the vast majority should not be infringed because a small minority abuses certain privileges.
It's an attractive argument. But there are, of course, some fundamental, practical differences between personal telephone calls and e-mails. E-mails have the potential to be much more damaging to a company - unlike a telephone call, for instance, they can include hundreds of pages of attachments from company files, they can be directed to a great many recipients at the same time, and they exist in a concrete, reproducible form that can multiply geometrically through the forwarding process.
As so often happens with technology-related issues, it will take the law several years to analyze and react to the current realities. Here's where we are right now.
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