In a decision that could set new ground rules for Internet privacy in the workplace, New Jersey’s Supreme Court has ruled an employer was wrong in retrieving e-mails between a former employee and her attorney, even though they were sent from a company computer, The Associated Press reports.
The 7-0 ruling in Stengart v. Loving Care Agency is believed to be the first of its kind to reach a state Supreme Court, attorneys involved in the case said.
“Courts are looking more closely at privacy claims in the digital worklplace,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington, D.C.-based public-interest research group. “Just because a person is using a company computer doesn’t mean they leave all their rights to privacy at the door.”
The case stemmed from a lawsuit Marina Stengart filed in 2008 against Loving Care, a northern New Jersey company that provides home-care nursing and health services, claiming discrimination based on gender, religion and national origin.
Before Stengart left the company, she exchanged several e-mail messages with her attorney from a company-provided computer, but from her password-protected Yahoo e-mail account.
Computer experts retrieved the e-mails, and Loving Care’s attorneys used them in preparing to defend the lawsuit.
In court, they argued that the company’s employee manual clearly states that e-mail communications “are not to be considered private or personal to any individual employee” and that Loving Care reserved the right to “review, audit, intercept, access, and disclose all matters on the company’s media systems and services at any time.”
A trial court sided with the company, but an appellate panel reversed the decision and ordered the company to turn over all copies of the e-mails and delete any record of them.
In affirming the appellate decision, Supreme Court Chief Justice Stuart Rabner wrote that while a company has a right to establish policies governing computer use — and to discipline employees who violate them — even a stated policy that an employer could read an employee’s attorney-client communications would be unenforceable.
