Recently two Prudential employees were sacked from the financial services company's Stirling headquarters after management said they were dealing illegal drugs - amphetamines, cannabis and ecstasy - via email at work. Both workers have denied the charges, which the Scottish police are now investigating.
It seems crazy, doesn't it - dealing drugs from the office? What were they thinking?
It is an extreme example. Yet it reveals how private we still feel email is at work.
We really should know better.
Firms make a point these days of detailing their internet and email monitoring policies in corporate handbooks. The accepted stance is that if you're in an office, working on a computer owned by a company, then that company has the right to read over your emails should it so desire.
Everyone uses some office time - and the company's fat pipe internet connection - to take care of personal business. You send email to friends, book a plane ticket for an upcoming holiday, make a call to your bank.
By and large managers are OK with this, as long as said employees are getting their work done.
The problem starts when this harmonious don't ask/don't tell situation lulls employees into thinking they don't need to exercise their best judgement in deciding how much time they spend on non-work tasks and exactly what those tasks are.
Can anything be done? Could management and HR be more explicit about corporate privacy policies? Perhaps, but bosses may not want to bring up the issue too frequently, as it could lead to extensive debate of activities they don't officially condone but are happy to unofficially overlook.
And chances are it wouldn't do much good either. As long as we all have our own email addresses and inboxes we're going to believe, however wrongfully, that our messages are for our eyes only.
One more story illustrates how even those of us at Silicon Towers can fall into the trap of thinking our email is our own.
Just today a silicon.com employee joked with the IT guy sitting at her computer supposedly fixing a problem: "What's taking so long? Are you reading my email?" He responded: "You think I have to sit at your computer to do that?"
Of course not.
Comments
There are 2 comments. Join the discussion
1. Camilla Pastille
Well actually - it wasn't long ago that the Information Commissioner (for it is he that protects your individual rights) was saying that if you put 'private' in the title of the email then the boss couldn’t read it.
Nonsense! If you send OR RECEIVE private email on a company email domain then the company has vicarious liability for anything you write or receive (e.g. the company gets sued, not you), therefore can read it all AND keep it for as long as it decides it wants to (forget about using Principle 5 of the Data Protection Act to demand your old private emails get deleted when you leave the company).
On the other hand you can proceed against snooping bosses under Principle 7 unless the company can prove they are protecting the data, protecting access to the data, and auditing any access - that might means the company should clear all email off the company's servers immediately (because it's stored unencrypted, easily read by techies) and store it all in a compliant repository such as Iron Mountain or IBM's Cryoserver (forget about most of the ‘email archiving’ solutions out there; most of them breach the Act).
Not that anyone actually does that, but that still leaves companies open to civil actions by employees under the Act is the system is so insecure that techies can read your email.
The real problem with 'personal' email is that there's no such thing - people just don't get it that the company's email system is just like the company's fax system - we don't 'demand the right' to send and receive private faxes, so why do we think we have these rights for email?
2. Kevin Inskip
I agree that all emails sent from or to a company email address belong to the company.
Surely it is not over burdensome to insist that employees confine private emails to private email addresses, after all the vast majority of us must already have them.
Access to private emails during worktime, if allowed is now so much easier, with access through sites such as "web2mail.com"