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Jun 19, 2008 -- New ruling clarifies e-privacy issues at work

Clark has long advised his listeners to be careful of employers spying on e-mails, text messages, instant messages and more. Now a new decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals rules that employers can only spy if the info is stored on one of their servers. If the info is hosted by a third party offsite somewhere, they don't have the legal right to snoop under this latest decision.

Employers will likely have new hires sign paperwork waiving their rights to electronic privacy to get around the decision. Existing employees may be asked to sign the same paperwork.

The reality is that most employers have keylogger programs and use artificial intelligence to look for keywords related to corporate espionage, sexual harassment or something else that could harm their bottom line. They're not usually spying to be nosy, though it all has a real creep-out factor to it.

Clark recalls when he once worked at a radio station where an employee was looking for another job and had been updating her resume on her work computer. When she was found out, she was called in and fired on the spot.

So be careful what you do at work. If you're working on equipment issued by your employer -- be it a PC, a laptop or a cell phone -- just be safe and assume they can have prying eyes.


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What others are saying

  • Definitely creepy.
    I wonder if the open source community could come up with a device that can be run from a flash drive, which can detect if a key logger is in use? I'm willing to bet that the OSC would be happy to work on something like this, as they too are victims of corporate spies.

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