Reuters – People walk down the steps of the Supreme Court in Washington May 20, 2009. REUTERS/Molly Riley

Thu Apr 15, 9:39 pm ET
As the high court’s 2009-2010 term winds down, Yahoo! News will look at some key cases whose decisions have potential to impact the lives of everyday people.

Most of us have done it: Sent personal emails from the company computer, texted a friend or significant other on the BlackBerry they gave you for work. No harm, no foul, you say — our lives are so crazy these days that it’s hard not to blur the lines between the personal and the professional. Of course that’s true, but company time isn’t the only issue — what about your privacy? What if the boss reads your messages? Would you be embarrassed  — or worse? Does your employer even have that right?

The rules surrounding workplace communication in the digital age are pretty fuzzy; so fuzzy, in fact, that we still largely rely on parts of afederal law enacted in 1986 — back when fax machines were all the rage — to govern our privacy on technologies we use today. Calling someone on the phone or sending them postal mail isn’t remotely the same as sending a text or an email, so as technology develops, so must the laws that protect the privacy of our communication.
 
“[The laws don't] really make any sense in the modern era,” saysJennifer Granick, civil liberties director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which advocates for free-speech rights in digital communication. “It’s just not the way the technology evolved.”
 
Important court battles being waged all over the country are helping to shape this area of law, but one case has made it all the way to the top of the legal system.

At issue in City of Ontario v. Quon is whether a SWAT officer — a public employee — had a reasonable expectation of privacy when sending personal text messages on a police-department-owned pager. The official policy at the Ontario, Calif., police department had prohibited personal use of things like email and the Internet at work, and employees were explicitly told they should have no expectation of privacy in that regard, but the policy never said anything about text messages.
 
At some point, pagers were issued to members of the SWAT team, who were later told at a meeting (i.e. not in writing) that texts sent and received on them would be considered by the department to be email,  and therefore subject to monitoring or audit. The officers were also told they’d be responsible for paying any charges incurred when going over the character limit in the department’s contract with the pager service. Eventually this arrangement eased into an informal understanding between officers and their superiors that as long as they paid the extra charges, the department wouldn’t look at their messages.
 
Sgt. Jeff Quon went over the monthly character limit a few times, but he faithfully paid the overages. He also sent text messages — sometimes sexually explicit ones — to his wife … and to a co-worker with whom he was having an affair. As he understood department policy, his superiors would not be reading his messages. But the department — tired of acting like a bill collector for overage charges — later changed its mind and requested Quon’s transcripts from the wireless service provider. (Quon was one of the officers who had exceeded the character limit more than once.) After the provider, Arch Wireless, provided the transcripts, Quon’s superiors were able to read his, ahem, personal messages.  
 
Quon and others, including his wife, who was not a department employee, sued, claiming the police department had violated their Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search. (In other words, the suit involves not only the employee’s privacy rights but those of the people sending and receiving messages to and from him.) They also sued Arch Wireless, claiming the provider had violated a federal statute when it gave the police department Quon’s transcripts without his permission.
 
After losing their battle in federal district court, Quon and his co-plaintiffs prevailed in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in California, with that court ruling they all had a reasonable expectation that the department would not read the text messages. And now it will be up to the Supreme Court to decide if the city violated theFourth Amendment, which protects people against unreasonable search and seizure by the government. (The high court will not be hearing a separate appeal concerning the wireless service provider.)

Although the ruling is likely to be narrow (sticking strictly to legal questions concerning the public sector), it will come at a time when there is great need for the high court to shed light on how the Fourth Amendment affects electronic communication. Hard to believe that when this case comes before the justices on Monday, it will be the first time the Supreme Court will consider how the Constitution affects so much of what we now take for granted in our workplace communications — indeed, many of us hardly pick up a phone anymore.

It’s difficult to see where the high court will go with this legally nuanced case, especially because there are so few similar cases to provide guidance, says Susan Freiwald, a law professor at the University of San Francisco who teaches cyberspace and information privacy law.
 
The ideological makeup of the court doesn’t help much either.
 
“Ideas about privacy don’t always correlate to traditional labels of conservative or liberal,” Freiwald notes. “You don’t really know how the justices are going to feel and how those positions translate.”
 
Whether this case has a broad or narrow ruling, the hope is that it will be a guide for both employers and employees as advancing technology makes it easier for us to blur the lines between private and professional communication.
 
The court likely won’t release its opinion until June, but for now, what’s the advice? A little bit of common sense, of course.
 
“Employees in general need to be a lot more careful about what they commit to writing,” says Robert Brownstone, a lawyer who advises employers on information privacy. “And if they do, they should not use their work computer, because that’s a whole different level of privacy.”

Are you concerned about electronic privacy in your workplace? Let us know what you think.

— Laura E. Davis

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/20100415/ts_ynews/ynews_ts1641