Office Email Systems Are Not For Personal Use: Common Sense Reminders For Your Employees
Sunday the New York Times printed a nice article about email privacy and monitoring, "The Risk Is All Yours in Office E-Mail"
Most of it is common sense, or should be by now. When you use your company's email system, do not expect any privacy for your messages.
It is their system; it is their domain; they own it and maintain it; in the U.S. companies can monitor all email if they have policies in place indicating they may monitor messages; do not do stupid things with email.
Do not send threatening messages, love letters, spoofed messages to look like they came from your CEO, messages that are illegal or used in commiting a crime (which of course you shouldn't do any way), or any of an infinite number of things that employees have actually done with email messages.
Also it is not a good idea trying to use your web-based personal email accounts (Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) from your company's network; Internet transmissions can also be monitored.
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Comments
I have to ask if you heard about the Port of Seattle Police email scandal that took place back in January? It is a prime example of the email privacy discussion in this post. I'm not sure what some employees are thinking when they send inappropriate/sexual/offensive/etc. emails from their work accounts... This is especially disturbing when you hear about a police department committing such heinous acts!
Posted by: Mila | March 6, 2007 8:06 PM
No, I had not seen this...thanks for the great example, Mila!
Yes, it is absolutely amazing to me the types of messages folks send using their corporate email. Typically I see this type of inappropriate email within SMBs more than in the larger companies, which often have more email monitoring in place, and more policies addressing inappropriate email.
Your Seattle Police example demonstrates that no type of organization is immune from doing very bad and stupid things with email systems.
Reading about them made me think of the show The Office. Every week they show multiple types of completely inappropriate activities by the office manager as well as by the other employees. While the show is very funny, it is also very sad to know that those types of actions and activities actually occur quite often.
Inappropriate use of email systems, and wildly inappropriate messages, can get a company into very severe trouble in many different ways.
Posted by: Rebecca | March 7, 2007 11:01 AM
I think this is due to a general lack of employee awareness in regard to security. An average person might not realize that everything they do on a work computer can be monitored.
I'm actually from Seattle myself, so that story really hits home for me. It's so shocking when a system that is supposed be working to PROTECT you engages in this type of inappropriate activity or suffers from a security breach.
Posted by: Mila | March 7, 2007 1:43 PM