Your boss shouldn't read your text messages without an OK, court says (9th Circuit)

LA Times ^ | 6/18/08 | Maura Dolan

[B4Ranch]

?However, we do not abuse the technology. Our texting is under 10 messages a month.<

What did you do before the technology was available? Call the school office to have her paged to the phone 10 times a month? I doubt it.

In the not too distant future, email and forums will be so necessary that we will die of shock and stress if they aren’t available 24/7.

[LongTimeMILurker]

Here’s some advice.

1) Use your home cell phone for all private personal messages and calls.

2) Only use your home email and home internet service at home. Don’t use office email and internet for anything other than office business.

3) If a colleage whose job you want violates the rules, turn them in. Maybe you can get their job. If you boss thinks this is important, then you should be rewarded, right?

[Still Thinking]

That’s an absolutely asinine ruling. A company has a right to company funded email but not company funded text messaging?

What I can't understand is why the provider caches them at their facility rather than simply forward them to the recipient with no record, like they would a voice call. Who asked them to do that, why would they want to assume the liability for doing so, and just who the hell do they think they are?

As far as the email comparison goes, I wouldn't want my ISP keeping permanent records of my emails or those of my employees either. Now if they're on company owned hardware, like emails on a PC, that's one thing, but for them to be kept by the provider at their facility, completely unnecessary and unacceptable. They shouldn't even know what they are when the message is in transit if at all possible.

[Still Thinking]

Sure, that’s reasonable. But having the messages cached by a third party seems unnecessary and dangerous to everyone involved.

[grellis]

Good court decision.

I'm absolutely certain that Kwame Kilpatrick agrees with you.

[grellis]

I wonder how decisions like this will affect a situation like that whereby evidence of misdeeds was culled from text messages in part?

So far, it has gone very poorly for Kilpatrick. His lawyers have fought tooth and nail to keep the textx from being turned over, and they ahve been given zero leeway. Thank God we're not in the 9th Circus.

[arc5]

Yes - why are providers caching the content? Should only be the detail similar to a voice call detail record.

Same for emails - should only be the email detail record and not the content.

Better to use voice as no carrier records the content and the best is to always do a cell phone to cell phone as the cost and effort of recording voice calls is tremendous.