Supremes: Stop (texting) in the name of love

    Public employers can monitor their employees' communication on work-issued devices, the Supreme Court ruled.
Public employers can monitor their employees' communication on work-issued devices, the Supreme Court ruled.

The U.S. Supreme Court had a message June 17 for workers with cell phones and other devices provided by their employers: Use your own cell phone if you’ve got something to text that you don’t want your boss to read.

In a case with direct implications for employees at public schools and colleges, the justices unanimously upheld a police department’s search of an officer’s personal, sometimes sexually explicit, messages on a government-owned pager, saying the search did not violate his constitutional rights.

The court did not lay down any broad rules about the privacy of workplace electronic communications in a world of rapidly changing technology. But the opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy did make clear that public-sector employers can monitor their employees’ communications on work-issued devices to make sure employees are following the rules.…Read More

Supreme Court hears text-messaging privacy case

The U.S. Supreme Court will likely rule that government employees should have no expectation of privacy when they send text messages using their business phones.
The Supreme Court will decide whether government employees should have any expectation of privacy when they send text messages using work-issued phones.

In a case with implications for public schools and colleges, the U.S. Supreme Court appears likely to rule against public employees who claimed a local government violated their right to privacy by reading racy text messages they sent through their employers’ account.

Several justices said April 19 that the employer, the Ontario, Calif., police department, acted reasonably in monitoring the text messages in view of its written policy warning employees they have no guarantee of privacy in the use of office computer and electronics equipment.

Justice Stephen Breyer said he didn’t see “anything, quite honestly, unreasonable about that.”…Read More

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